All Saints Day/Halloween Saints Costumes

Last week I received an Oriental Trading Company catalogue and flipped through it expecting to see the same crafts and cheap toys that I steal ideas from and re-create myself, but then something caught my eye.

$6.00 robes and $3.00 veils in any color in the Christmas pageant section.

You're shocked too right? I about called my husband I was so excited.

Let me explain. For the past several years I've been making my kids saints costumes. While I have (mostly) enjoyed doing that, this year, it's just not happening and I don't want a repeat of last year when I scrambled to make a costume for my 2 year old. My original plan was to not dress him up, then guilt set in.

Look at my adorable St. Anne. She's wearing a black robe and red veil. Humm, I could buy that costume for my 5 year old for $9.00.

Mixing and matching robe and veil colors lead to endless saint possibilities. If you order all black your child can be Benedictines like Sts. Benedict and Scholastica. Brown for Carmelites like Sts. Francis of Assisi and Therese of Lisieux. White for your son to be a Dominican like Sts. Dominic and Thomas Aquinas and the next year you can add some wings and a halo so your daughter can be an angel. OR you can add an over the arm sash to a brown robe and become almost any biblical character.

Unfortunately, they don't have toddler sizes, and you'll need to attach the veils on as hoods for some of these, but I don't think that would be too difficult... think tucking it in behind the kids neck and using safety pins. Still if you think outside the box, you could come up will all kinds of cheap ideas!

They also had some other options.

For $10.50 my now 3 year old will be St. George the dragon slayer. And for $6.00 my 5 year old daughter will be Queen Esther in a purple robe. I'll need to make her a gold sash and crown, but that will be nothing compared to years past.

They have plenty of beautiful Mary costumes for as little as $13.00 and of course St. Joseph! The robe is so colorful I think you could be either biblical Joseph.

And thanks to the Easter pageant, your child can even be Jesus for $10.00. I love the beard, but it's $6.50 more.

They actually sell monk costumes so you can have a Franciscan for as little as $7.99!

I'll be sure to post some pics of the kids when we put these cheap and easy costumes on for our up-coming All Saints events!

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The Rosary and Kids

Last year I posted a few times on integrating the rosary into family life. Since October is dedicated to the rosary, and today is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, I thought it would be appropriate to pull them out of the archives!

Part 1 consist of making an edible rosary. I've seen people make these with mini-cupcakes too, so cute!

Part 2 is all about how to make praying the rosary a pleasant experience with hands on activities.

Part 3 shows how we have used art to help make the rosary come to life.

Part 4 features some our favorite rosary products.

For DOZENS of ideas on how to teach your kids about the rosary check out this link from The Catholic Toolbox. Also, we love Holy Heroes, check out their Rosary CD set!

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Flowers for Therese

"My mission - to make God loved - will begin after my death. I will spend my heaven doing good on earth. I will send a shower of roses." St. Therese

I love embellished headbands. I'm not really sure where this obsession came from, but it's becoming rare to see me without one. For the past few weeks I have been wanting to find the time to make some headbandable felt flowers to add to my collection and today, on the feast of St. Therese, seemed to be the perfect time to do it.

We always celebrate the Feast of St. Therese because she is FOCUS' patroness and we love her. Why is a cloistered nun the patroness of a missionary organization? Glad you asked. Head over to the FOCUS equip blog to find out, my husband posted on it yesterday.

After eating our traditional rose colored and shaped pancakes Bean and I got to crafting.

The instructions on how to make them are almost identical to the instructions I posted on how to make headbands using scrapbook flowers. The only differences are replacing the scrapbook flowers with flet flowers (I printed off some patterns from Danielle's Place and used them as my guide) and sewing on buttons instead of using craft brads.

The back of a felt flower, I used ribbion with this one.

I took my inspiration from Running with Scissors who showcased some beautiful bouquets, although mine are not nearly as ornate!

Bean was a perfect model and is very excited about her new headbands...

and clips.

I think St. Therese would approve.

Later today we'll pull out the kid's books on St. Therese that we picked up in Lisieux last year, as well as our Treasure Box books that I posted on last year. I'm stilling trying to figure out a fun flower dessert, so we'll see if that happens.

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