Over the years I have collected a hodgepodge of fake pumpkins and gourds from thrift stores and garage sales.
Some are Styrofoam. Some are plastic. One is really heavy (and I have no idea what it’s made of).
This year, I decided to give them a makeover.
I started by basecoating them all in white. (I used gesso, just because I had a bottle of it stored in my basement that I bought for a project a couple years ago. I’m sure white craft paint or primer would have worked just as well.)
I liked the white, but I wanted some variation amongst the pieces, so I decoupaged newspaper strips on a few.
The newspaper was a little heavy and hard to work with, especially around all the curves of the pumpkins, so I scanned part of a newspaper page into my computer and printed it out onto a piece of tissue paper — which is harder than it sounds. I had to tape the tissue paper to a piece of regular 8 1/2″ x 11″ paper to get it to feed through my printer, and it took more than a few tries before I managed to get a piece to emerge from the printer un-torn.
Decoupaging on the tissue paper was easier than working with real newspaper.
After I ran out of the newspaper-printed tissue paper, I remembered I had some tissue paper with faux handwriting on it, so I dug that out of my stash.
I decoupaged the faux handwritten tissue paper onto a few of the pumpkins and gourds.
On the remaining plain white pumpkins, I dripped and splattered some paint on, using browns and blacks and beiges.
I wound jute twine around the tops of the pumpkins. To make the twine spiral, I dipped it in watered down Mod Podge, then wound it around a pencil until it dried.
I had pictures of that process, but they were taken on an old point-and-shoot digital camera during the time when I couldn’t access my iPhone photos. And then I robbed the memory card out of the point-and-shoot to use in my work camera. And then when I downloaded the work pictures, I apparently deleted the blog pictures. Grrr.
Anyhoo, I’m much happier with how the pumpkins and gourds look now than they did before.
The number 4 is from an old perpetual calendar that I bought at a thrift store. I repurposed the calendar part long ago, but the numbers were still in a cabinet, waiting to be used. I may tie a few more to some of the other pumpkins.
I did this project about month ago. It just took me forever to get photos rounded up and get everything together because (if you read my last post you know) my life was kind of in chaos from about Sept. 14 through about yesterday (knock on wood). I started a new job, was taking a night class and my home computer died.
