Pumpkin Projects

I am so glad that fake pumpkins are now available in craft stores!  I always thought it was a sin to go through all that trouble to carve or decorate a pumpkin, only to have it rot and be thrown away.  So my first pumpkin craft of the season was using melted crayons.  I did some melted crayon projects a few years ago and they are fun, but messy.  I looked up a tutorial on this and the only thing that I would change is the adhesive.  They recommended Alene's Tacky Glue, but I spent about 2 hours putting the crayons back into place because they kept sliding.

I decided to do the melting outside this time, rather than in the bathroom, because it was going to take longer to melt the entire crayon and get them to drip.  Some colours melted better than others.

I definitely had trouble with the greens and blues.

Another one I wanted to try was glow in the dark paint.  I picked up a pack of Tulip GITD paint with 5 colours plus white.  This one took awhile to paint and even longer to dry.

We'd had a few cloudy, rainy days so I couldn't properly charge the pumpkin in sunlight, but I stuck it under my craft light for a couple of hours and I was so pleased with the results!

Really hard to get a good pic of this, but I carved the Hogwarts logo into one of the craft pumpkins (it came in the colour black).  It was pretty hard to cut the fine details into it and it's pretty ragged around the edges but it's the best I could do.  I finally found some halfway decent flameless candles although I have to use two of them inside.  These pumpkins are flammable, so no real candles can be used.

I had one white craft pumpkin left and was going to do another project with it, but I was unable to find a bat-shaped paper punch and I can't draw a bat to save my life.  The project required at least 30 or more bats so I scrapped the idea and instead attempted to draw a Day of the Dead sugar skull design.  I googled tons of design ideas and then just fudged it the best I could using a black paint pen.

And then one of my fave actors from when I was a child, Bill Mumy, liked it on Facebook.  This fangirl was beyond thrilled.  He's never liked any of my posts before.

I also bought 2 pumpkins because I wanted to roast the seeds and carved them too.  I really wanted to go with a Seahawks logo.  And even though we hardly get any kids at our house and my pumpkins are on the back deck rail, I was afraid it might get knocked over 'accidentally on purpose'.  So I went with an owl instead.

I've also wanted to do a Grateful Dead themed pumpkin so I did the dancing bear and I got in over my head with it.  It was very hard and tedious to cut.  Took me about 2 hours off and on.  Plus I was making homemade tomato soup at the same time I was trying to carve it. The foot on the left side really doesn't look that weird, it's just down on the lower curve of the pumpkin.  I may replicate this again next year on a craft pumpkin cause I like how it came out.