DIY: Last Minute Pumpkin Ideas!

Hello!

We are two weeks out before Halloween (a week for those of you who will be celebrating 27th and on!) and after Monday’s post, I was really inspired to compile all of my favorite pumpkin crafts for you! I think crafting with pumpkins is a fun thing to do both as an adult and if you’re parent with young children! It’s like the seasonal coloring book you never thought you needed until later on.

For the most part, every post has a list of what you’d need and I have even done step-by-step photographs in case you get lost in my words which has happened before! I try to be very helpful in guiding you through all of the projects, some might be a little confusing and I do apologize for that. Sometimes we just made up the rules as we went along and that can be pretty fun too! You are welcome to interpret what you see into anything your heart desires as long as you enjoy what you’re doing and don’t stress about your mistakes!

• The Pumpkins – I have many versions of how to melt crayons on pumpkins but this one is visually pleasing I think. The pictures turned out beautifully, so that is the main reason why I am sharing this one instead. 
• The “America” Pumpkin – This is a clear example of a last minute pumpkin idea, my nana and I actually worked on this early November and I published the post later that month while we discussed what we were going to do for Christmas! This is probably the simplest one out of the bunch!
• Awareness Glitter Pumpkin – I decided to include this one because October is the month for two very big things: Breast Cancer and Domestic Abuse. My Great Aunt Shirley is a survivor of breast cancer and my sister is a survivor of domestic abuse. So it has a double meaning for me!
• Ophelia Pumpkin – I actually got the idea to do this after seeing it in the magazine Country Living and I guess I loved the idea so much that I ended up just doing it!
• The Punk-y Pumpkin – This one is an older post, when we didn’t have anything for our crafts yet. However we made do with a least used nail polish and a tub of silver glitter! 

I am sorry that these are the only ideas I have on my blog, I actually have more but they don’t have any good photos and I’m pretty sure my writing in general is down right awful so if you want to check the rest out, go to my search box on the top right and put in “pumpkins” and it should give you all of the posts, plus a few other Halloween inspired crafts too!

Hope you have enjoyed this post!

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DIY: The “Boo!” Sign

Howdy!

Well now we’re getting down to the wire of getting Halloween decorations out for the house, fun costumes for the whole family to wear and candy for the trick-or-treaters, At the end of this week it’ll be Halloween like legit and I’ll probably be tucked up into my room watching Halloweentown eating candy we don’t give away to our neighbor kids.

I haven’t done a DIY post in so long that I thought it wouldn’t happen again until Christmas. This season has been a little different for everybody I think. From late September to the beginning of November, my nana and I usually decorate pumpkins. I’ve been looking forward to glittering up a pumpkin for a while! I’ve explained in my other posts that my mom has bought a couple of pumpkins to use as decorations for our front porch. Now we have six of them and I’m not allowed to glitter them! So I’ve had to find something else to DIY for Halloween! At the beginning of October, I was involved in a blogger chat hosted by Jenn and the theme was Halloween/autumn DIYs and after that chat was over I went on Pinterest and I found so many crafts I wanted to do that I was a bit overwhelmed! After looking through for inspiration the next day I went to Wal-Mart with my folks and I purchased three wooden letters: B-O-O.

Since my Aunt Laurie and Uncle Mike came down the other weekend, my nana and I thought maybe we could get them to agree to do some pumpkins with us or help us with the letters instead. We didn’t get any pumpkins but we did have some fun doing the sign though!

If you want to do what we did, here is what you will need:

• Newspapers
• Paper plates
• Wooden letters
• Glue
• Spongy brushes
• Glitter (black and orange)
• Foam Board (optional)

Now I have to say there were a couple of things different from how my nana and I usually do our DIY projects while we’re both in our wheelchairs. Well, the day we did this she was trying to learn how to work her new laptop, so I got to be on the floor for the first time doing a craft and I felt so comfortable! It’s hard work to support not only upper half of my body in the push wheelchair, but my neck as well! I didn’t have much pain this time around because I didn’t have to worry about the seat moving on me everytime I moved my legs. It’s hard being disabled and using your lower limbs as hands and keeping your posture at the same time. I made it though!

Okay, let’s get done to business! My Aunt Laurie laid out the newspapers out on the floor and helped me with the glue, unfortunately I couldn’t squeeze the container and put it on the sponge brush. I’m pretty sure I would have fallen over if I had done that! I don’t remember whose idea it was to get these sponges but they were a genius! The handle was perfect for me to grip and I used it like a normal paint brush and brushed glue across each letter. Once I got a section covered I put the brush off to the side and Laurie or Mike would give me the bottle of glitter. We had the mini bottles of glitter that came in different colors and at first I left the lid on it but I was having some trouble with covering the area with glue on it before it dried up. Each letter was placed on a paper plate that way if any excess glitter came out we could (try) put it back into the container. After we were finished covering the whole letter we tipped it on its side and let the excess run off. Laurie tried to recover most of the areas that were now naked. After each letter was done we put them on the side of the newspaper to dry.

We couldn’t find any wood boards so Mike purchased a fairly large foam board. I was told that he was going to use a section of it to create a stand for it. At first we didn’t know if it was going to work because the “O’s” didn’t want to stay in their spots especially the first “O” it kept wanting to slide off. Poor Mike had to put his finger on it for almost half an hour. I’m not sure what kind of glue he used because I don’t think it was the same we used with the glitter. The other two letters weren’t too bad so that was good! However, when we put all three on the stand we thought it needed something. I forgot to get an exclamation point, but honestly I don’t remember seeing one with the others! At first we were going to take a small area of the foam board and use a pin to connect it together and glue it into the stand itself, but Mike made a whole exclamation point to glue onto the board . So I glittered it orange to keep up with the Halloween theme! After I finished throwing the glitter on it, I decided that I wanted to try to put the glitter back into the container. I fold the sides to make sure the excess glitter went in the middle of the plate and hoped for the best. Majority of it did make it inside the bottle the rest went out to the sides. I even put the lid back on and locked it.

Not bad for my first try I must say! This was so much fun to do, I think my aunt and uncle enjoyed it too. At least I hope they did! So this is what we did.

What have you created for autumn or Halloween?

George the Pumpkin!

We did it! And without burning down the house in the process. We didn’t do what I had seen on Pinterest, with using a lighter and lighting each one and then placing them on the pumpkin. Leave that up to the professionals, or say the ones who feel more comfortable with a lighted match. My nana had sent me a video from YouTube the other day of how to do it, and if you want the video go here. One of the things on the video was to soak the crayons in a cup full of water before tearing the wrapper off it. Well, that kind of worked for us. It worked for the ones who were still wet from that morning of soaking. I had a hard time getting periwinkle unwrapped with my toes. My nana did majority of them and I didn’t have much energy to mess with a stinking crayon. I mostly broke the crayons in half and she broke them smaller if they weren’t small enough. The video said to use a hot glue gun to place them on the pumpkin, but not too high on the pumpkin. So we kind of estimated to put them really. We did it in two sides that way we knew how much to use. We actually have a lot more left over for next week or Sunday. I wanted to use the blue and purple ones first, but only grabbed one purple crayon. I don’t know how that happened. 

Here are the crayons on top of the pumpkin. 

Here is the first area after finishing it.

When we were working on the other side, my papaw came in from the other room and I think he was kind of amazed how the crayons were melting on the pumpkin so well. He literally stayed there, sipping his coffee and occasionally looking at our new masterpiece. Once we were officially done with the pumpkin. She unplugged everything and I began to feel VERY tired. Between not getting any sleep last night, waking up at 7:30am, going to my mom’s work for her meeting, and then lastly therapy. The entire day about wore my ass out. I was surprised this even happened today because I didn’t have any energy at all. Even with the ice cream, sugar can only go so far! Here it is, almost 6:30pm and I am surprised I am even awake now. If I don’t get any sleep tonight I’ll be pissed. So I leave you with the last picture of our handsome pumpkin. I think my nana can agree with me when I say her burned thumbs were worth it. Meet George the Pumpkin! (:

That’s A Pumpkin Of A Different Color

Yesterday, I did a post about decorating my mom’s punky pumpkin with glitter and hot pink and black nail polish. We didn’t have regular paint so we used what we had. You’ve probably heard about what we’re doing on Friday too. If you haven’t read my post from yesterday, on Friday my nana and I are melting crayons on the pumpkin with a blow dryer. When I got up this morning, she was chatting with me on Facebook about it. She even sent me a video from YouTube of a nice tutorial of how to properly do it. Plus a few things we never thought about doing too! Here is the video she found and that I think we both watched at the same time in two different areas of town. It was weird I’ve got to say!

We also wanted to go by the cute, fun and quite interesting names of the crayons., We literally made a list. And I have no idea if we’ll even use all of these colors that we have in the baggy or not, but the names are kind of hilarious. You have the simple one word names like: Green, Plum, Black, Copper, Yellow, Lavender, Peach, White and Fuchsia. There was even two that stand out the most of the list. There is a crayon in the baggy that doesn’t have a wrapper on it, so we are calling it “Blank” and I know that’s the most awful name to call a crayon that we don’t know what the name of it is. The second one is definitely red, but it’s not from the brand that every crayon is from. This one is from Red Lobster. When my sister and I were kids we were practically raised on going to Red Lobster, every year on my birthday I get told that I knew my grandparents were eating at Red Lobster because the day before and day of I arrived my grandparents went there to eat, but never got a chance to. And I say, sorry every year too!

The other colors are named:

1. Deep Purple                 21. Perfect Purple                                      41. Green Yellow
2. Sea Green                     22. Mahogney                                             42. Peacock Blue
3. Timber Wolf               23. Blue Violet                                            43. Cotton Candy Pink
4. Liquid Gold                24. Purple Passion                                      44. Burnt Orange
5. Coal Black                   25. Wisterta                                                 45, Teal Blue
6. Tree Bark Brown        26. Sugar Plum                               46.  Outrageous Orange
7. Grape Vine Purple          27. Grass Green                                           47. Sunglow
8. Cadet Blue                     28. Cerulean                                                 48. Carnation Pink
9. Blizzard Blue               29. Camp Fire                                              49. Wild Watermelon
10. Tan                                 30. Melon                                                     50. Robin’s Eye Blue
11. Goldenrod                   31. Olive Green                                            51. Apricot
12. Marvelous                   32. Hot Magenta                                          52. Salmon
13. Indian Red                     33. Rose Bud Pink                                      53. Playin’ Da Blues
14. Parywinkly                 34. Pink Orchid                                           54. Jellybean Blue
15. Chocolate                     35. Magic Mint                                            55. Key Lime Pie
16. Sephia                            36. Ocean Blue                                            56. Electric Lime
17. Baby Blue                       37. Lazer Lemon                                         57. Thistle
18. Sky Blue                       38. Vivid Tangerine                                     58. Radical Red
19. Spring Green                39. Blue Green                                            59. Tumbleweed
20. Taco                         40. Yellow Green                                         60. Purple Piazz