Halloween is drawing ever closer and although I’ve never really been one to decorate I decided I wanted to make something. I looked around the house to see what I could come up with. After going through all of my craft supplies and wandering around the house a bit I decided to try to make a pumpkin-filled candle holder.
Well, to be honest, I didn’t initially plan on a candle holder. My original plan was just to fill the vase with pumpkins. I was going to make half orange and half glittery but it kind of turned into a disaster so I adapted LOL
I gathered up all of my supplies, laid the cardboard over my kitchen table and got started.
I wanted to paint half of the styrofoam balls orange. After getting paint all over my fingers on the first one, Ryan suggested I use a paper clip to hold it – Genius!
So I unfolded the paper clip and stuck it into the styrofoam ball. I use the other half to hold it. I found it caused less damage to the ball if I held it upside down instead, otherwise the paper clip moved around and created a bit of a whole. Yikes – I really need to do my nails 😀
Once I had the balls painted I thought it was time to try the glitter.
Now you may or may not know, I am not a crafter – this is a new thing for me. I was trying to figure out the least messy way to glitter up these styrofoam balls. I thought it was brilliant when I decided to use the plastic from a set of glass votives I have. I poured the glue into the middle space and then poured the glitter in either side. I wanted to use gold & silver glitter – clearly that didn’t work out. It got all mixed up and poured out in multi-colours. I messed up my whole container of glitter but figured I’d run with it. It is Halloween after all – nobody would criticize me for crazy colours.
I stuck the first ball in the glue and tried to roll it around to cover the whole surface – fail. The glue was too thick and globbed up so I grabbed a paint sponge and tried to smear the glue around with it. I thought this had worked and stuck the ball into one of the wells of glitter. I rolled it around and it became evident that I missed getting glue on some areas. I tried to patch it up and roll it around in the second well of glitter. This just turned into a disaster.
My fingers were covered in glue and glitter was everywhere. I decided to quit while I was (somewhat) ahead and painted the rest of the balls orange. I had to go back and apply a second coat to all of them too since they were still streaky.
Once they orange balls were all dry I painted little faces on each of them. They aren’t very good, I can admit it LOL. As I said before, I am not a crafter and was working with a dollar store paint brush that was not very good even by my standards! For a first attempt, I’m happy 🙂
I shredded up a sheet of black construction paper and scrunched it up to make a base for the vase. I then stuck in the painted jack-o-laterns . It didn’t quite look full enough so I grabbed a battery operated tea light and stuck it in the middle.
With the lights off and the candle flickering between the faces, I’d say it looks pretty spooky!