DIY Minion Pumpkin Tutorial

        We had to take the minions to the next level....PUMPKINS! Or punkins, as my cute and strange hubby would say!  One of my sisters sent me a link to these super cute minion pumpkins- Craftberry Brush.  So, we did what any mother of an obsessed 4 year old would do....we copied!

     I so wish that I would have come up with this idea myself, but alas I feel like my brain is melting most days and my creativity is waining!  But that's another story.  Anywho, we usually carve and paint our pumpkins. Our pumpkins NEVER look like the typical jack-o-lantern.  We do go super creative when it comes to Halloween.  We use toothpicks to make things stick out of our pumpkins.  Last year, we had a bunch of black crows on our pumpkins.  One year, Andrew's pumpkin was painted to look like Frankenstein.  So painting a pumpkin is nothing new.
     Since we take so much time to prepare our pumpkins, we always bring them in on Halloween.  You see, we have some nasty & mean high schoolers now 20 somethings, that live down the street, who LOVE breaking little kids' hearts by smashing their pumpkins!  We learned our lesson a few years ago.
     I started by painting the blue overalls onto the pumpkin.  Then I covered the rest up with yellow.   I just used craft paint that I had on hand.  I'm pretty sure I bought the bottles from Walmart, for around $1.  The hardest part was waiting for it to dry.  Some days, I'm super impatient.  My husband might describe that a little differently!  Anyway, I should have done 2 coats of paint, but I didn't!
   

     I also had mason jars and lids on hand (hoping to learn how to can someday, but they've been sitting in the garage for a couple of years- I'm also sometimes a procrastinator, or easily distracted!)  I painted the metal rings black for the goggles. Lily calls them googles!  I took the inside parts and turned them around, so the white was facing out and hot glued them to the metal rings.  I took a nail and hole punch the inside parts and stuck them to the pumpkin.  For the eyes, I just used blue paint and painted pupils right where the nail is.

      I painted a black band on both sides for the goggle straps.  I free handed the mouth with a pencil and then painted it.  I used black paint and went around the edges of the overalls and made a pocket.  The pocket didn't really stand out, so I mixed a little white and black and lightly went around the edges of it.  For hair, we just cut a few pipe cleaners into pieces and poked them into the pumpkin.

      Lily was totally impressed with my mad painting skills!  I think she might nominate me as Mom of the Year!  We're going to try the same thing on another pumpkin, except he'll be an evil minion- purple!