Every year we do a fun family night where we carve all of our pumpkins. It ends up being a lot of work and takes a fair amount of muscle to get the job done. We haven’t carved our pumpkins yet but we wanted to do some fun decorating, so we decided to have some friends over, raid our craft box, and decorate our pumpkins our own way!
First I pulled out everything that we could possibly use to decorate that we had on hand. We ended up with paint, chalk markers, sharpies, stickers, pom poms, stamps, brushes, foam sponges, and mesh netting for design stamping.
We started by painting our pumpkins. We had a choice between acrylics and washable paint and we went for the acrylics. If you choose to use washable paint you may have to seal your pumpkin so that it doesn’t rub or flake off easily.
Luckily, it was nice and sunny so we left the pumpkins to dry in the direct sun for approximately an hour.
After drying, we let the kids have at it with decorations! They chose stickers for the most part, but there is so much room for creativity here!
Another friend of ours decorated with melted crayons and glitter. She used the crayon tutorial found here. The only modification she made was to tape the crayons down instead of gluing them down.
Her glitter pumpkin turned out phenomenal! They painted their pumpkin the day before but it isn’t necessary to do so. First they used a glitter mod podge and overlaid that with even more loose glitter. Look at the sparkle!
A couple more ideas are to use glow in the dark puffy paint or collect some beautiful fall leaves and mod podge them to your pumpkin.
What are your favorite no carve ways to decorate pumpkins? Share with me in the comments below and Happy Fall!
