I love this time of year! Cooler weather, fall festivals, football games, Halloween, changing leaves, and pumpkins… pumpkins everywhere! Now that it’s actually cooling off a little here in Oklahoma, I wanted to do one of my favorite fall activities– decorating pumpkins! (It’s hard for me to get in a pumpkin decorating mood when it’s still 90° outside.)
Like most people, I remember carving jack-o’-lanterns around Halloween when I was growing up. While I always felt like I was involved in the pumpkin-carving process as a kid, I really wasn’t. The reality was that I drew on a pumpkin with a magic marker, and my dad did almost everything else. As a parent, I now realize that carving pumpkins is a lot of work for the adults involved. Also, my dad is much better with a knife than I am. So for us, having kid-friendly pumpkin decorating alternatives is much more fun for everyone.
Here are the no-carve ideas we’ve used so far:
Melted Crayons
This turned out to be our favorite! But it was also the most time consuming.
For this one you’ll need:
- A pumpkin (of course)
- Crayons
- Glue gun
- Hair dryer
I started by placing the crayons on the pumpkin so I could decide the order and the spacing I wanted. Then I went around and peeled off all the paper and hot-glued the crayons to the pumpkin.
After that was finished, we started melting the crayons with a hairdryer. I’ll admit that it took a lot more time than I originally anticipated, but the kids both got to help melt the wax with a hairdryer and they loved the way it turned out.
Quick tip: break the ends of the crayons off. If you don’t, they’ll just melt and fall off in big chunks anyway.
We did this project indoors. Keep in mind that you are melting wax with hot forceful air… as you can see in the picture above, it gets a little messy. I’ll be picking wax off the baseboards for a while.
Glow in the dark paint
I’ve seen this a few times as a popular alternative to carving a jack-o’-lantern.
One thing to keep in mind is that the texture and the color of the glow in the dark paint makes it’s very difficult to actually see the paint on the pumpkin. The picture below is after three coats.
This also makes it difficult to coat the paint evenly. In this case, the uneven coat actually helped the jack-o’-lantern look creepier, so it ended up being a good thing.
Glitter Glue
My six-year-old daughter was very adamant that she wanted a glittery pumpkin. This was a shock to no one. We couldn’t find any glitter paint, so we went with the next best thing– Elmer’s Glitter Glue.
I’ll be honest, I had low expectations for decorating a pumpkin with glitter glue, but it worked pretty well.
If we use the glitter glue again, I think painting the pumpkin with primer first would keep a lot of it from running. My daughter was really happy with how it turned out.
Washable Paint
This is my favorite paint to use for decorating pumpkins.
- It’s easy for kids to paint with. It sticks to pumpkins and it covers really well.
- It’s easy to wash and redecorate the same pumpkin multiple times (which kids love).
- It’s easy to clean up.
This is how my four-year-old decided to decorate his pumpkin today, and tomorrow we can wipe it off and he can do something completely different.
I need to emphasize one more time that this paint washes off really easily. If your child paints something they love, be sure it doesn’t get rained on. It will be gone before you know it.
All of the above.
This was two years ago. I had a box of all different kinds of paint, and I let my daughter (who was 4 at the time) decorate it however she wanted. She used it all… on one pumpkin. Glitter, neon, glow in the dark, all of it. It took a little over a week for the paint to completely dry. She was so proud of it that we ended up keeping it on our front porch for two months.
Such fun ideas. I love the washable paint idea that you can do over and over again!