As part of my 31 Days of Pink I had to flex my creative, crafty muscles.  If you know me, you know that this is a muscle I rarely move, let alone flex.  In fact, my crafty muscle has atrophied I am sure.  My creative muscle however has been bulking up over the past year so this should help.  🙂

31 days is a lot of days to come up with different ideas to bring awareness to breast cancer so I am forced get inventive and step out of my box.  Although, that is usually where the fun happens so I step out with joy as well as a bit of trepidation.

[Tweet “Out of our box is usually where the fun happens so I step out with joy”]

I am passionate about Halloween as well as spreading the word about breast cancer so the idea of painting pink pumpkins seemed a perfect fit.

My inspiration came from a local friendly ghost that every October will leave a beautiful painted pumpkins on our doorstep anonymously.  I have my suspicion about who it is but it is always such a joy to receive this beautiful gift.

My 16 year old daughter joined me for this project so no matter how the final product turns out, I already chalk it up as a win!

Here are the materials we used:

• various acrylic paints
• a variety of pumpkins in different sizes
• various paintbrushes in different sizes
• a ribbon assortment

We covered our work surface and began painting.  You may need to wipe the dirt off the pumpkins before you start.  After a couple of coats of the base color we decided what design we wanted to add.

We let them dry overnight and added ribbon to the stem.  You could also paint the stem if you’d like but we chose to leave them natural.  We stayed mostly in the pink family with our paint and ribbon colors but my favorite color is green so I had to throw that in there!

There is no wrong way to do it although I did discover a few tips along the way.

• Use a glossy paint or a glossy top coat.  I used acrylic paints and they looked ok but didn’t have a sheen to them.  It would look more “professional” if they had a bit of shine.
• Have a variety of sized paintbrushes.  You need large ones of course to paint the body but for any writing or detail a fine tip brush was needed.  My designs and letters didn’t come out as crisp as I would have liked.
• Let the paint dry before you add another coat or try to write lettering or a design.

And that’s it!  Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy!

These pink pumpkins will look great on your front porch.  It is a super simple way to get people thinking about breast cancer as they’re driving by.  Hopefully that will lead to a reminder about checking themselves and scheduling that mammogram!

Salty Pink Kisses,

Karen