Corey Colwell Lipson of Green Halloween walks you through this heart-felt craft for Valentine’s Day!

Green Halloween® is a nationwide non-profit initiative started by mother-daughter team Corey Colwell-Lipson and Lynn Colwell. In 2010, Green Halloween became a program of EcoMom® Alliance and has events in cities across the U.S.

Meet Griffin! An adorable 19-month-old boy from St. Paul, Minnesota.

His mother, Sarah, was inspired by Green Halloween® to make Griffin an eco-friendly “Griffin” costume for Halloween this year!

(Be sure to check out Griffin’s 2009 owl costume made from wool fleece and Eco Felt).

As you may or may not know, a Griffin is part lion, part eagle so what’s a Griffin mama and daddy to wear? You got it!

Sarah was a “Eagle Mother” and her husband, Andrew, a “Lion Dad”.

Each costume was made with either recycled materials Sarah found at Goodwill or from home, and Eco Felt or wool felt. One of her favorite transformations was using an orange bath mat for Andrew’s lion mane!

All in all, Sarah spent less than $15 on supplies, which also made it a thrifty Halloween!

Sarah, we love your resourcefulness and style; can’t wait to see what you come up with next year.

Green Halloween® is a nationwide non-profit initiative started by mother-daughter team Corey Colwell-Lipson and Lynn Colwell. In 2010, Green Halloween became a program of EcoMom® Alliance and has events in cities across the U.S.

The lovely folks over at Oeuf is holding a creative costume competition. Even though Halloween is officially over, it doesn’t mean the creativity has to end. All you need for entering is a picture (drawn by kids of course!) and what their dream costume is. Submission deadline is November 14th, 2010 at midnight. One lucky child will have their dream costume made especially for them by the Oeuf team. The winning costume may even be apart of Oeuf’s dress up collection. Now that is a sweet deal!

Check out the Oeuf Dream Dress-ups page for details on how to enter. Happy drawing!

Green Halloween® is a nationwide non-profit initiative started by mother-daughter team Corey Colwell-Lipson and Lynn Colwell. In 2010, Green Halloween became a program of EcoMom® Alliance and has events in cities across the U.S.

Loralee Leavitt is the creator of www.candyexperiments.com. Her articles about candy experiments have appeared in Family Fun, Parents, Mothering, Highlights, ParentMap, and Miami Family Magazine.  Recently she presented candy experiments at the USA Science and Engineering Festival.

Pictures reprinted by permission of www.candyexperiments.com.

As a Green Halloween reader, you’ve filled your Halloween bowl with healthy treats and eco-friendly toys for trick-or-treaters.  But unless your own trick o’ treaters stick to Green Halloween houses, they’ll bring home loads of candy you don’t want them to eat.  What can you do with it all?

Try candy experiments.

Three years ago, my daughter started our family’s candy experiment tradition.  “What would happen if I put these Nerds in water?” she asked me.  I got her a bowl of water, she dissolved the Nerds into a lovely purple liquid, and we poured it down the drain.  When she asked again a few days later, I covered the table with bowls of water.  It didn’t take long for my two children to dissolve and dump their entire Halloween stash.

Since that fateful November, we’ve gone through bags and bags of candy.  We’ve dissolved it, smashed it, floated it, microwaved it, frozen it, painted with it, and tried whatever else we could think of.  We’ve learned about density, dissolving in hot or cold water, testing for acid in sour candy, and water displacement (what happens when your son dumps so much candy in a bowl of water that the water overflows).

At http://www.candyexperiments.com, we’ve posted a dozen of these experiments that kids can try at home.  For instance:

Acid Test: Test for acid by dissolving sour candy in water, then add a spoonful of baking soda to make bubbles

Find Hidden Candy: check labels to see how much sugar is in a serving of food, then weigh sugary candy so the kids can see how much sugar that really is

Oil Test: Melt chewy candy to separate out oil spots

But you don’t have to use our experiments.  Put out bowls of water, table knives, rolling pins, and whatever else you think might help them get creative with their candy.  You’ll be surprised how fast they go through it all–without eating it!

So don’t be dismayed by big bags of Halloween sugar.  Set up a candy lab in your kitchen, and watch the candy dissolve away.

Green Halloween® is a nationwide non-profit initiative started by mother-daughter team Corey Colwell-Lipson and Lynn Colwell. In 2010, Green Halloween became a program of EcoMom® Alliance and has events in cities across the U.S.

Halloween has come and gone. Time to put away all the decorations and save your costumes for next year’s costume swap.

The only obstacle standing is the heap of leftover candy. What do you do with it? Better yet, what can you do?

Instead of just tossing, or keeping around to consume, we’ve prepared a list of unusual ways to reuse and recycle unwanted sweets.

1. Compost

Instead of tossing Halloween treats in the trash, why not “recycle” by composting? If you have curbside yardwaste/food composting, just unwrap candy and toss in the bin. If you have an off-the ground compost bin, you can also include leftovers there. Composting candy in a ground-heap compost may attract pests, so another idea is to push pieces, one at a time, into the soil of houseplants.

For additional information, check out these these resources. Happy composting!

2. Halloween candy buy back

Did you know there’s a program that actually buys YOUR leftover candies and uses them in care packages for oversea soldiers? What a great idea! It’s called Halloween candy buy back and they provide the candy for Operation Gratitude. If you have the leftover candy to spare, why not register with them and make someone else’s life a little sweeter?

Operation Gratitude received and shipped out 60 tons of candy last year and is hoping to be able to ship 60,000 care packages this year. Check out their fantastic video if you’re still not convinced!

3. Candy experiments

(Loralee of CandyExperiments.com has kindly agreed to writing a (forthcoming) guest post for our blog but we’ve decided to include her in this post anyway!) You might wonder, what could candy experiments possibly mean? Well, it sounds exactly as it is! Making experiments with candy. This provides a fun activity for everyone in your household and who doesn’t love a little science experiment? Grab your flasks and goggles folks because you never know what chemical reactions will result in mixing these candies together! Have fun!

Green Halloween® is a nationwide non-profit initiative started by mother-daughter team Corey Colwell-Lipson and Lynn Colwell. In 2010, Green Halloween became a program of EcoMom® Alliance and has events in cities across the U.S.