Halloween craft: Swirly crystal pumpkins

When I saw the cover of the 2009 Better Homes & Gardens Halloween magazine I bought it immediately, purely because of the image of that pumpkin on the left with the swirly designs. If you look closely, the swirls are made of little gems, and since I'm all about adding a little bit of *bling* to Halloween I knew right away that I wanted to make one of my own. My mom saw it and loved it too, so we decided to make the pumpkins when she came here to help me before Porter was born. Because he took his sweet time in getting here, we had time to get our pumpkins completely done before I went to the hospital! I even made one to send to my Sweet & Sinister swap partner and now that the package has been sent and received I can finally post about it. This was such a fun, easy and satisfying craft project and I've been dying to share it with all of you! Here are some of the particulars:The pumpkins:
We used the fake pumpkins that you can purchase at Michael's as they were slightly less expensive than the Funkins brand from JoAnn's. We used both the large size and the smaller size. We wanted our pumpkins to be black and white rather than orange like on the magazine cover, so we used a can of black spray paint to spray some of the white pumpkins black (fortunately the painting went better than last year's attempt). We didn't initially paint the stems but after we were all finished we realized that black stems would look better, so we used black acrylic craft paint and a small sponge brush to touch them up.

The crystals:
The most difficult part of this project was finding enough crystals to use for our pumpkins, since we knew we each wanted to make more than one. The crystals we used are from Prima Marketing. They are self-adhesive and they come already placed in the swirl patterns, so all you have to do is stick them onto the pumpkins. The ones we used come on a sheet that looks like this:Each sheet is slightly larger than a sheet of paper and contains 4 large swirls, and will cost you approximately $7. The colors we used were black and clear (they also come in black diamond, which is really more of a smoky gray or charcoal). We bought out the stock at Archiver's and two separate Hobby Lobby stores to find enough packages of each color. Here is a link to buy the large black swirls on Amazon, and here is one for Ritz Camera (it doesn't appear they have the same swirls we used in clear, though they have a different design).
We found that it took approximately 6-7 of the crystal swirls for the smaller size pumpkin: 5 swirls to go around the top and then an additional swirl or two to cut apart and add in here and there to make the design balanced. Because the swirls are self-adhesive it's as easy as peeling them off the backing and placing them carefully on the pumpkin. On the painted pumpkins we had to be careful in our placement because the adhesive lifted off the paint if we tried to adjust the swirls once they were adhered. We also used larger single gems in both black and clear to accent the swirl designs. We purchased those at the Hobby Lobby as well and attached them with Glue Dots. I can't recall how many swirls the large pumpkin used, but I know I used more because I wanted them to come further down the sides of the pumpkin.

The leaves:
The pumpkins shown in the magazine didn't have any leaves, but I remembered that I found some awesome vintage silver foil leaves at a garage sale earlier this summer that would be just perfect for our blingy pumpkins! For the black pumpkins with clear crystals we left the leaves silver but for the white pumpkin with black gems we spray painted them black with a bit of the leftover spray paint. Then we simply hot glued them to the top of the pumpkins (this is when we realized we should have painted the stems. Alternately, you could cover the stems with coordinating glitter).

I love how the pumpkins turned out! My photos don't do them justice. They sat on the table for a few days after we finished them and every time I walked past them I think I mentioned how much I loved them...I think The Mister got sick of my declarations of affection for my silly pumpkins!

I'm linking this post to Kimba's DIY day!