Stirring My Brew

pretend kitchen play, dabbling in chemistry, creative thinking, Halloween fun.

A while back – at the beginning of the Halloween season, I came across some “specimen jars” used for decoration. I loved the spooky, eerie thought of these but didn’t want to spend the money on them for decoration – maybe some day if we had a party. I “banked” the idea as I do with so many things that inspire me…

Last Thursday during the bitter cold rainy days I had to do something to keep Buga occupied inside to keep us all from going crazy. I remembered I hadn’t yet taken out the Halloween Sensory Bin supplies so I quickly gathered them, some rice, and a HUGE metal mixing bowl – we are talking about 2.5′ in diameter. I just loved the way the rice sounded as it rustled against the metal bin. We listened to Halloween music while Buga pretended to “bake”, make “potion”, and “stir her brew”.

Fast forward to this week. I was in Michael’s perusing – looking for some supplies for the shop when I happened upon the “organization section” of the store. Drool. My house is not organized, but it’s not from a lack of my trying. And I do so love organization. Anyway, I found these cute plastic scrap-booking jars on clearance (and I had a coupon)…and I thought, oh, I know these could be SOMETHING.

Continuing on my shopping journey I came to the Martha Stewart Halloween Crafts section (which was on sale / clearance because the holiday is so close) and I came upon these magnificent specimen “labels” for a Halloween party. I loved the look of them so much that I decided to head back to the organization section and pick up those bottles. (This picture is actually them, but smaller…I had to copy and resize them to fit the bottles. But now I have the originals I can use for a party sometime, too.)

When I found these, I had a plan. All of the dots connected to make a pretending

game / kitchen / store I thought would be so much fun. It just hit me and here are the fruits

or toadstools of my labor of love….

Here are the bottles, all labeled. Now for the fun part – deciding what would go inside. I wanted all of the items I found to resemble somewhat the labels…not to be too small, so we could add them to our “mixture” and still take them back out again (for sorting purposes) and restocking purposes…and to be spookily fun.

I turned an old wooden cooking spoon into a cooking “broom” with a little left-over chocolate colored yarn.

A little bit of this and a little bit of that and an Apothecary Shop I made. I scrounged up an old witches hat and cauldron from the basement. Some leftover styrofoam “meat” trays from the grocery store to use as “plates”.

I gave it to Buga this afternoon to play with. She sure did fancy her new role as witchress in the brewing kitchen. She played with it for a couple hours today which made me totally happy. She loved discovering what was inside each of the bottles. While we cooked we sang the song….