Make a Fantasy Pumpkin for Fall

Create an amazing faux pumpkin:

For this faux pumpkin creation, I selected one of Michael’s 9″ flat craft pumpkins. I think these look most like the Cinderella pumpkins with a flattened blossom and stem end.

Paint a faux pumpkin:

The first thing I did was to paint my pumpkin. I began with one coat of glossy brilliant white paint.

I followed that with Craft Smart White Pearl paint. I found this to be the prettiest of the pearlized paints. I painted two coats of this on the pumpkin.

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It looked beautiful just like this, but I had more plans for this little white pumpkin!

Cut the faux pumpkin:

I used the hot knife attachment on my Versa Tool to cut around the pumpkin so I could take the top off.

After cutting all the way around the pumpkin, I was able to lift the top right off.

If you are trying this project, don’t be overly concerned about how much of the top to take off, just look at the photo and judge accordingly.

The cut edge will show some in this project, so I used the glossy white acrylic paint to paint the exposed cut edge of the pumpkin.

I also used the same glossy paint on the edge of the cut off top of the pumpkin.

Fill the inside of the faux pumpkin:

I cut some cardboard off of one of my many Amazon deliveries and folded some shape similar to this shown below. This is nothing that has to be exact, this is just filler for this pumpkin.

I used two of these cardboard filler pieces and used my hot glue gun to adhere them to the bottom of the pumpkin so they would not move around.

Next, I cut a white paper plate to fit it down into the pumpkin, but on top of the cardboard fillers.

I just tucked the edges of the paper plate beneath the edges of the pumpkin. You can see I did have to bend it up just a bit to fit it in. I didn’t feel I needed to secure the paper plate with hot glue, but if you feel you need to, you can add a little bit of hot glue down inside the pumpkin to secure plate.

Adding decorations to the faux pumpkin:

Now is the fun part! I picked up a small package of mother of pearl colored Christmas ornaments and began gluing them into the pumpkin. I secured them both to the paper plate and to the edge of the pumpkin.

Anyplace there were holes between the ornaments, I added these craft pearl beads.

I would go back and forth between having the the top on the pumpkin and taking it off to work, to see how the pumpkin would look with the top on.

You can see all of the glue strings in this photo, but I wanted you to be able to see how I added the pearls to the ornaments. I eventually added at least two rows of the pearls all of the way around the top cut edge of the pumpkin.

I wanted this to look as if the pearls were bubbling out of the pumpkin and down over the sides.

I took a couple of different photos of different sides of the pumpkin so you could get an idea of how I did this.

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The reveal!

After cleaning off all of the glue strings, it was time to display my beautiful pearl encrusted pumpkin!

A special addition to your faux pumpkin:

You can get even more creative with a pumpkin by adding some battery powered fairy lights inside so that it offers up a warm glow in the evening.

Here is one more shot of it lit up at night. I tried to find some white lights, not the warm yellow ones I had on hand.

Maybe your fantasy pumpkin will be encrusted with gold beads, or perhaps you want to try a MacKenzie Childs Courtly check on yours. The craft pumpkins are on sale and make a great pallette to get creative with! I hope I have inspired you to make your own custom pumpkin this season.

Supplies for this project:

Michael’s ‘cinderella’ style pumpkin
Pearl acrylic paint
Glossy white acrylic paint
Christmas ornaments
Christmas ornaments
Pearl beads

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