No carve pumpkin decorating

I love Halloween. And candy and DIY costumes. And October and pumpkin decorating. Let’s face it, there is just so much to love about Halloween! Happy 1st day of October, y’all! Let’s get this pumpkin decorating season started!

Carving pumpkins is hard for me. In fact, I’m jealous of people you can carve intricate designs in their pumpkins. I’m not that patient and patterns are so hard for me to use, ha! Needless to say, decorating vs. carving pumpkins has always been my thing! I first saw a thumbtack while researching unique pumpkins for a post a few years ago. (The thumbtack pumpkin is #10 and the site has since been set to private so I can’t give any original link love!) Anyhow, Madigan Made recently made these awesome thumbtack pumpkins and well, I decided to give some thumbtacks a try! I actually had some leftover upholstery nails from a DIY project long ago, and I thought I had enough to make my ghost, but that did not work out. I bought a pack of these bad boys for $3.50 to finish up my ghost.

You can see the difference between my white thumb tacks and the painted upholstery nails in this picture. I just used a pencil and sketched a little ghost and then started tacking. It was really that easy. Oh, this is a real pumpkin by the way, but I bet it work on fake pumpkins too.

Here’s a close up of the ghost before I used the sharpie marker to give him some eyes and a mouth. Don’t be scared to layer those suckers!

 I sharpied 2 thumbtacks for the eyes and voila:

The ghost mouth is made of 3 tacks. Pretty cute, huh? And definitely the easiest pumpkin I’ve ever made!

Now, on to the spider web pumpkin… I painted it white with some craft paint and then used my handy dandy Sharpie to free hand a web. I used the lines in the pumpkin as a guide.

After you get the horizontal lines drawn, start on the chevron pattern. It doesn’t have to be perfect, mine certainly is not.  After all, this is just pumpkin decorating, y’all!

I spruced up my spooky scene with some $1 webs and added the spider rings that came in the web pack! Fun, right? And so freakin’ easy!

Are y’all good pumpkin carvers? Have you ever used thumbtacks on your pumpkins? I highly suggest it! If you liked this post, here are 21 more no carve pumpkin decorating ideas! Oh and if you want more pumpkin decorating and carving ideas check out 20 unique DIY pumpkins and 21 clever pumpkin carving ideas!