The Curse of the Fall Pumpkins

You may recognize these fall pumpkins from last year.  Yes it has taken me that long to complete them but its not a for a lack of trying.  When I started this project I was thinking this would be an easy, classy project.  How hard can painting fall pumpkins be?  It should be fairly easy unless you purchase a cursed pumpkin.  Dun, Dun, DUN! 

 

Obviously the first two pumpkins haven't changed.  I was satisfied with how they turned out the first time.  I bought the gold pumpkin from Michaels, using a coupon of course.  I like that it had the black already peaking through.  The only thing I added was the orange stripes using a metallic orange acrylic paint. 

 

Even the second pumpkin didn't take me very long to complete.  Buy pumpkin from Michaels,  Paint large gold circles (I used a stencil I made from the Silhouette) and use a small circle brush for the champagne circles.  Place modgepodge on the gold circles and sprinkle with gold glitter.  Pumpkin complete.   

The third pumpkin however refused to work with me.  Last year I spray painted the pumpkin gold.  I wanted to add an argyle pattern so I taped off some diamonds using painters tape and used a silver acrylic paint.  After the paint had dried I discovered there was not enough contrast between the gold and the silver, they had almost an identical value.  So I tried adding black to my silver paint and reapplied a coat of paint.  That didn't help.  It was not looking good whatsoever.  So, I sanded it it down and that's where I left it last fall.

In August I decided I wasn't going to be defeated by my defiant pumpkin. I thought a black chevron design would be AWESOME.  The black would contrast well and I wouldn't run into the problems I had last year.  I began taping away and used a black spray paint that also had a primer in it.  I began pulling the tape away... my heart sank.  Again, it looked awful.  The paint had leaked under the tape so my lines weren't crisp, the lines were different thicknesses, and when I placed it next to all of my other pumpkins it just didn't fit in.  Another pumpkin fail!

My next thought was that it needed to be simplified, not nearly so busy.  So I sanded it down and spray painted it silver.  I had seen this clever trick on Pinterest to glue on Epsom salt to give it a somewhat glittery effect without looking like glitter.  I wanted to do this to the top of the pumpkin and have it dripping down the sides.  Only problem was that the Epsom salt all fell off making an even bigger mess of my pumpkin.  

By this time I should have just thrown the old thing away and just started over.  It would have been soooo much easier.  However, I had already put so much time and money into this stinkin pumpkin.   

*Enter ANOTHER trip to Michaels*

That's it no more fancy treatments.  I'm just going to spray paint it all silver again and find some pretty ribbon to attach.  I was desperate and tired of meeting failure.  As I perused the aisles at Michaels I found this really pretty white/silver glitter ribbon from Recolletions.  It was in the Halloween display.  It immediately began singing to me.  My pumpkin had found true love.

 

The best part of this story is that when I got it home I discovered that it wasn't ribbon.  It was a fancy scrapbook tape.  All I had to do was cut the strips to the length of my choosing, remove the backing, and tape it to my pumpkin.  Recollections has a few different colors and styles of this fancy tape and it is my new best friend.

In the end I'm glad I went simple with this large pumpkin, it was exactly the touch all my fall pumpkins needed to tie them together.  I can't wait to show them all together.

And they all lived happily ever after... for now anyway.

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