Marbled Blacklight Pumpkin DIY

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If you’re a pumpkin crafter, I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of nail polish pumpkins.  The thing with nail polish pumpkins; however, is that you have very little polish to work with and you generally can only dip smaller-sized pumpkins with them.  Also I personally think using nail polish is a lot more stinkier than spray paint (this may be a personal preference).  Anyway, after seeing this post a few years back Alisa Burke marbleizing paper and ornaments, I knew I wanted to try it with a pumpkin and I’m actually happy with how mine turned out.  Let me show you how easy and fun these are to make!

What you need:

— faux pumpkin
— various colors of spray paint (I used neon so they’d look good under blacklight)
— large bin filled with water
— Gloves (get the gloves, see below)

Before you begin:
Fill a large plastic bin with water. You want enough water so you can submerge your entire pumpkin.

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Spray the first color on top. It will spread out as you spray into a halo shape in the water.
Keep spraying and adding more colors till the surface of the water is totally filled with colors.
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Once you’ve sprayed the surface, immediately dip your pumpkin.
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It takes a little force to push the pumpkin below the water.  It was hard for me to capture on camera, but once your pumpkin is totally dunked, you need to pull it up lifting off the paint from the surface of the water.
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If there’s an area of the pumpkin that you’ve missed, you can dunk it back in and focus on that area. You may layer over top of a. section you’ve already covered, but because this is abstract and random, it’s hard to mess it up!
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Remember when I said you needed gloves. This is why.  I got the spray paint on my hand and it took a couple days for it totally to be off my hand. There was a lot of hand washing those two days. LOL.

Here’s what it looked like when I set up my blacklight.  I was wanting the neon to really pop and pop it did!  I am looking forward to putting this in my glowing decorations this Halloween!

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Distressed Subway Art Pumpkin


Here’s a fun project I did a few weeks ago on my friend Jen of Tatertots and Jello blog and thought I would share it with you today!  It’s an homage to those vintage NYC subway signs. It’s pretty cool how something vintage-inspired can turn out so modern! Let’s get started!

For this project you’ll need:


– 1 large pumpkin (I picked up a faux one at Michaels)

– various medium to large sized scrapbook stickers (I got mine in the craft section at Michaels)
– large vinyl stickers
– black spray paint
– sandpaper
You’ll want to start off by peeling off your stickers and attaching them to your pumpkin in the subway art fashion, spacing the words a similar width across.  It doesn’t matter the color of these stickers as you will be spray painting over top of them. I actually found that several of them lost some of their stick, so I ran it through a Xyron sticker machine to make them sticker.  Also, if you have an electronic sticker die-cutting machine and want to give it a go, you can; however, I don’t know if the results will be the same.


Your letters should look something like this before you begin to spray paint. Make sure to firmly press them in place before spray painting.


Lay your pumpkin with the words face up and lightly mist the spray paint on top giving good, even coverage. This will help keep the spray paint from seeping under any of the stickers. Let dry a few minutes. Go back and give it a second coat if needed.


Now lay the pumpkin on it’s base and spray paint the back and sides thoroughly.


When the pumpkin is dry, carefully remove the letters.  I noticed that a few of my letters did get a little paint shadowing, but in the spirit of it looking distressed, it just added to the feel!


Now take a fine grit sandpaper and lightly rub around pumpkin, distressing it a bit. This will give it a battered/worn look. I even did it over the letters for an aged look.


And here’s a detail of the words up close. I think it turned out really cool!

You can mix and match up your words to suit you, you could make it more fall words or family words, whatever you like!
Until next time Swellions!
Alexa