Grungy Primitive Pumpkin

I saw a post on Facebook recently that showed how to make a small pumpkin using a roll of toilet paper that had been cut in half width-wise, then wrapped with fabric strips. I wanted to try it out for myself, but I really didn't want to waste an entire roll of toilet paper to do it. What can I can say--to me, toilet paper is a valuable commodity. ;) But I knew I had some Styrofoam balls tucked away in my studio, so I decided to give one of those a try. And this was the result. 

I cut a small slice off the top and bottom of the Styrofoam ball to help it sit flat, and look more like a pumpkin. Then I used a fat marker to hollow out a column down the center of the ball, so that I could wrap the fabric strip. I just shoved it down the center of the ball and pushed out the foam.

I used one very long strip of torn fabric--it wasn't muslin, but I'm not even sure what kind of fabric it was. It's just what I had on hand (it's what you see under the pumpkin in the photo as well). I tucked the end of the fabric into the center of the ball and then started wrapping the strip of fabric around and around, overlapping each strip a bit as I went all the way around. Once I got the ball all wrapped with fabric, I tucked the remaining end in the center of the ball too. I somehow managed to tear a strip of fabric that covered the entire ball. I don't think I could have planned that--it was just luck. :)

After that, I picked two colors of spray I had in the studio--one was Glimmer Mist by Tattered Angels in Copper; the other was a dark brown color--I believe it was by Mr. Huey's. I used the Copper color first, since it results in a nice dark orange color on the fabric. I sprayed it all over the pumpkin. Then I just added some of the brown spray here and there to give the color some variation. I dried it all with my heat gun, then went out into the yard and found a stick that could be my pumpkin stem and I stuck it in. 

Voila. Grungy Primitive Pumpkin! You could really make several of these fairly quick and they'd make great table decor for the Fall. You could do more to embellish it, of course. Add some rusty wire, or a leaf, or pip berries, or any number of things really. But I was going to for simplified here. Primitive and rustic. Sometimes that's really all we need.