I love putting Halloween pumpkins on my porch, unfortunately no matter where I love – on a lovely house in suburbia, a gated apartment in Houston, or in a nice, but touristy area of uptown New Orleans – people steal them if I don’t carve them. So the last few years I’ve been decorating them. Last year I painted them, and no one bothered them, they stayed on the porch for months after Halloween.
Last year’s retro painted pumpkins
This year I’m short on time and thought ‘I’m going to do something easier’, but I wasn’t sure what. Then I thought, I love sparkly things, especially disco balls, and googled ‘disco ball pumpkin’. A lot of them with tiny little holes came up, but I didn’t want to carve them. Also people who had cut up old CD discs, but that didn’t look very good. I went to Party City and Michael’s, with the idea of getting something shiny to cover them in, and actually found some sheets of mylar at Party City, but then I saw all the glitter at Michael’s and bought some ‘just in case’. And some acrylic paints, liquid glitter, fabric trim, some big foil pans, a drop cloth and spray paint… It was all so pretty, but suddenly not easy.
I looked at the mylar and thought ‘how hard can it be to spray paint pumpkins?’. All the guides said just to sprinkle the glitter on the wet paint. So I windexed my pumpkins, even taped one off with painters tape (Phoebe helped) and took them out on the porch.
So long story short, it wasn’t easy at all. The paint didn’t stick well, the glitter didn’t stick and was crazy messy. I love the way glitter looks but I really hate it when it’s loose, or can get anywhere that might end up on my face or eyes. After several hours of spraying, sprinkling and making a huge mess I just decided to let the pumpkins stay outside and sit on the pirch to dry (which took forever). I painted the stems contrasting colors and glittered them also, and I still want to add some additional trim to them, but I realized that I won’t be able to glue anything on to them because of all the loose glitter. I’m going to have to pin the trim on them.
I also realized I won’t be able to put the two silvery ones up on my porch pedestals like I wanted to because any rain at all will probably wash the glitter off, so they’ll be down on the porch floor again this year. I’m going to put a few lights around them (I bought some orange tube lights that also fit into my disco theme) and that will probably be it this year (with the indoor door lights it will be nice and bright). Last year I spent days weaving about 20 strands of orange and purple lights around my porch railings but this year there are planters and I’ve got a lot going on with the Anne Rice Ball so I’ll start earlier next year and do the lighting extravaganza then.
While I had the paints out, I did realize that I had two mini pumpkins and added some of the smaller trim I had bought because it was cute and on sale to one of them, and am still working on the other, I painted it silver and am debating painting the other slices black or putting some more fabric trim on it (I also have it in black/silver). These were a lot more fun to do, lol.
So here is where I am with the large pumpkins. I bought some black ribbon with big shiny silver dots which I’m going to pin on the black pumpkin, and I may leave the other two as they are.
