Halloween is gone, here comes the Christmas time! Get all those orange decorations down, and prepare for white, red and green for at least a month from now on!

But wait, don’t throw away that pumpkin, I need it for a Christmas decoration. And if you are like me, I bet you have more than one Halloween pumpkin to save for this easy upcycling project. 

What You Need

The pumpkin comes first, of course. There are a few other items to put on your list for this project: paper duct tape, spray paint (I choose white) and a few Sharpies in different colors (I recommend red and green ).

How to Do It

Clean the pumpkin so the paint would easily stick on its surface. Cover the stem with duct tape so you could later paint in differently than the rest of the pumpkin.

This might give you some hard times because the irregular form of the stem. If you think it’s not worth the effort, then leave it as it is and cover it with the same paint. You could color it later, but it will be more difficult to cover since the stem would have absorbed some paint already.

Place the pumpkin on a large piece of paper or other type of cover to protect the soil, and spray paint all over it. Take care not to spray too much at once, as the surface of the pumpkin is shiny and the paint might slip down on the sides.

Also, be careful when painting around the stem, to obtain a proper coverage and leave no orange spot behind.

Let it dry completely before going further with your design.

Design and Draw

First, cover the stem in a solid color like red or green, using the Sharpie. You can also use an acrylic paint for this task if you think that coloring it with the Sharpie would take too long.

Now you have a colored pumpkin ready to be drawn on. Presume that the stem is the center of your design and start drawing around it.

Draw pine branches or any other ornaments at your choice, until you cover the upper part of the pumpkin. In the end, you will get a nicely designed Christmas pumpkin like the one I got on this project.

As I said, you can draw anything you like, but if you need a little inspiration, here’s the pattern that I’ve made and started from to finish my drawing. It’s only a quarter of the whole design, but it was enough for me. I’m sure you can see the logic and replicate it on your pumpkin.

Briefly, you have three cones on each quarter of the pumpkin, and you replicate them four times. You just have to start from the center, namely the stem, which is represented by the red area in the lower left corner of the picture below.

What I got in the end, is this funny decoration that I will later use for a Christmas table setting. The Christmas tree is not prepared yet, nor the shiny decorations for the rest of the house, but the good is still to come…

Do you still have any uncarved pumpkins on your porch? This is the perfect project to recycle them this winter!

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This project has been featured on Hometalk.