I love the traditional plastic orange pumpkins from Target. I love the nostalgia that it brings, I love the joy on the kiddos faces when I take them out, I love that they are only $1 and without fail I can always find a use for them and lastly, and who can forget all the cute pictures I took of Commodore and EV last year using the massive $6 one?! You will definitely see this on repeat this year too.
Anyway, totally unrelated, but the Mamala and I happened to be in Target the very morning that they were unpacking their Halloween boxes and I literally audibly gasped much to the amusement of the Target employees. As I began to grab everything in sight (there will be a blog post) and throw it into the cart.
Sidenote: is it just me or is the Hyde&Eek stuff seem less expensive than it did last year. The decor in particular...not just the regular items like the $10 throws and such?! I feel that this feeling of "can you believe this price" in particular caused me to be a bit more excessive than I intended.
Anyway on an endcap on the way to the Halloween merch is the decoration/birthday/crafting section (the Spritz section), and this is were all of the plastic Target pumpkins were housed. For only $1, I had grabbed four which is typical Dana fashion, I can never just take what I need because without fail I will regret the decision the second I am home and have to go back out and get more as I think of all the ideas I now want to use them for. It is just better this way trust me (I will probably get more still). My initial plan for the pumpkins was to hold on to two and use the other two as cauldrons for the kiddos spooky kitchen (the next blog post).
In crazy happenstance, I was on Instagram on the ride home from Target with our Haul-Oween (the Mamala was driving) and came upon one of my favorite Disney Shop Instagrammers (@thisdflove) and her new project. She has some of the most creative ears and occasionally she does a release of ear cases (I have a haunted mansion one that she did last year that I positively love and EV uses it for hers). She had created a "reel" of taking one of the $1 pumpkins and turning it into a Jack Skellington planter (I actually have this saved in my highlights on my instagram (@disneymamaofboth) if you need the actual reference. Case in point, how hers turned out....divine right?!
I am a huge fan of Nightmare Before Christmas (NBC for the cool peeps) and was floored by what she was able to do with the pumpkins and then was even more excited with the fact that I had literally just scooped up several without having a gameplan (are painting them black and calling them cauldrons really a gameplan?). I figured what harm was it in trying to recreate this and if I screwed it up royally I had planned for them to be black cauldrons anyway and I would just spray paint over them in black.
Here is a fun fact: spray paint goes bad. I began to spray one of the pumpkins with one of the many white spray paints we had (albeit they were pretty much all done for) and it came out this egg-shell yellow. Another fun fact: even with a license, you cannot drive up and pick up spray paint from Home Depot. You have to actually go into the store which is the whole point of drive-up, but whatevs. In any case, if you have no idea what the OG pumpkins of our youth look like....ta dah...
I didn't want to copy exactly hers as I felt weird doing so and instead chose to do a gentle nod in her direction. I looked up several Jack images on the ol' Google and although I found a bunch of fun ones, I ultimately went with this one...
I love Rustoleum laquer spray paint (the exact paint can below) and used the gloss-white for this project. I love the finish of it and how anything I have spray painted with it has looked and I especially love that it stays looking exactly the same over the years from the time I first spray painted it.
Obviously someone was pretty darn excited about the pumpkin makeover about to happen.
Unless you are a free-handed painting genius, I suggest using a pencil and doing light strokes so that mistakes can be easily erased, it won't take paint off, and it won't smudge. I draw pretty decent free-hand so I just set my phone in front of me, plopped down with the pumpkin in my lap and plotted out. I marked a middle line and did the mouth first so that the middle line of his mouth was my starting point and I worked out both sides doing the right first and then the left. In hindsight, I would have done the mouth a little higher up, but that is what the otehr pumpkin is for.
My original plan was to cheat the system and use a thick sharpie to color in everything and make clean and defined lines, you know what did not work, said sharpie. I had to apologize to the kids for the amount of F bombs that came out of my mouth upon this realization.
Again, pure luck of the draw I had just happened to buy a package of Mondo Llama Halloween Paints (HERE) a day or two before. I never should have mocked how just because the line insanely inexpensive that the quality would not be good, because boy color me surprised, they are AWESOME. EVERYTHING IS AWESOME and I know need it all (I went ahead and bought a bunch of the Halloween crafting things for the kids). The acryllic paints suited this project perfecly and in typical Dana fashion, I am tempted to go back to Target and pick up another set of them (they are THAT good). I actually used the white to clean up any of the black that I smudged onto the pumpkin from my hand or just to clean up the black in general. The white worked perfectly. I would clean up the lines, leave the white to dry over night and then delicately make the black lines more pronounced the next day. I used THESE paintbrushes again from Mondo Llama as there are a lot of sizes and widths and the entire pack was $5 (they are perfect for kids of all ages). Now these I actually got more than one of.
And here you have the finished project...the sword was actually already there lol
Gotta admit, I am pretty proud of it!
As stated I have another three of these pumpkins and the original intention was for me to have it at the kids spooky kitchen, but I am kind of ashamed that I love it so much, so I think I am going to keep this one for us to display and just make another set for the kiddos...hopefully they will make it to the kitchen.
Anyone else have really creative activities or planned projects that you are doing for Halloween?!
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