Sugar Skull Masks for Day of the Dead

This one's a little late, but you know what they say; better late than never...

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As you know last week we celebrated Halloween. What you may not know is that Halloween wasn't the only celebration of the week. Following right on the heels of Halloween is the Latin American holiday Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead).

Day of the Dead is a day to remember and honour those who have passed away. The holiday is celebrated with candle lit processions and altars dedicated to the deceased. These altars are decorated with (among other things) candles, marigolds and sugar skulls.

In preparation for Day of the Dead, Ava and Lola made sugar skull masks with their friends Rider and Fiona. We used the Sugar Skull Mask Kit from Paper Source which contained pretty much everything we needed. You can find them online here. We added a few glitter pens and stickers (also from Paper Source) to the mix and the kids had a field day decorating their masks.

Ava, Rider and Lola show off their masks 

It was fun seeing what the kids came up with on their own. The older kids (Ava and Rider) used quite a lot of glitter glue and were quite symmetrical with the placement of their decorations. Ava added extra cheekbones to her mask by sticking the cut outs from the eye holes onto the sides! Just like adding prosthetic cheek bones! I like to think that Rider gave his mask grills with the addition of the glitter on the teeth! Ava covered her skull's teeth with glue in order to make them look shiny!

Rider and Ava's masks

Lola and Fiona were happier to use mostly stickers on their masks and their results were much more asymmetrical. Lola would have kept adding more and more stickers to her mask if I hadn't taken them away!

Fiona and Lola's masks

While all of the masks turned out very different from each other, they were all fantastic and the kids had a great time working on them. We were lucky to have a nice afternoon so we worked up on our rooftop garden.

Lola, Fiona, Rider and Ava work on their masks

Lola adds another sticker

Ava's mask

Rider's mask

Lola's mask

Fiona's mask

Rider shows off his mask

Boo!

Not so scary

Ava and Lola with their masks