The Great Pumpkin Experiment

I have a secret... a shameful and embarrassing secret.  It's about an addiction... sometimes denied, always satisfying.  I'm addicted to craft magazines.  The really cheesy holiday ones are best.  Particularly Halloween and Christmas.  I love them, buy them voraciously, squirrel them away for reference the following year.  But I always buy new... to compare, you know.  

Well, it seems this halloween has a bit of a craft magazine trend... gothic, romantic, turn-of the century, wonderful.  I love it.  All of it.  The costumes are historical, the decor is old fashioned, and the pumpkins, well, they're black and covered in glitter.  I can do that, I think to myself as I see the adds for $40 glitter-covered pumpkins from Pottery Barn.  So, I hit the Dollar Tree... my favorite source for craft goodies.  Shameful, again, I know.  Whatever.  I don't judge your dirty little secrets.  Here is an example of the crappy, foam-core pumpkin "decor" I found... 

Buck a piece, friends.  Damn good buy, I'd say.  But only for experimenting with black paint and glitter!  Otherwise, waste of money and crap-tastic looking on your table.  So, we begin:  

I painted them first with a layer of Black acrylic paint...  

I missed a step, but once they were completely painted black, I painted over with a layer of black craft paint with glitter in it... some weird decorative paint I got last Christmas when I was making decorations for my tree... it's hard to find black Christmas decorations.  I'm a little bit dark, even when it's not Halloween.  

Once the black paint dried, I mod podged the heck out of 'em and covered them with black glitter.  In case you were wondering, I found the big jar of black glitter at Hancock Fabrics.  It was pretty great, I have to admit.  Or maybe it was the wine...
Nope... it was the glitter.  Close-up shot.  Pretty!  Two of the pumpkins got this treatment, and then two of them got a nice treatment with the silver puffy paint.  I haven't used the puffy paint in a LONG time (I think since last Christmas helping out a co-worker with stockings for her and her hubby) so I made a couple of splatters, but I was able to cover them up... the second one I did turned out better... 

Here's one of each kind... the sparkly one (which you can't really see with the camera) and the first "viney" puff painted one.  I think they look really awesome.  

And here they are in their current resting place... the trifle bowl filled with pebbles, next to the armadillo.  I think it says a little something about my mental stability.  You can see the second puff-painted one in the bowl... it has little dots that look like they're dripping from the top of the punkin'.  

So that's the latest experiment.  I might need a break until Sunday.  But there will be more food-related goodness posted at that time, so stay tuned for my culinary feats and fiascos as well as what are sure to be more and more crazy craft-magazine inspired and plain-old random projects.