Another success & an easy How - to

Last Friday, I was feeling a bit creative as I was turning over my house from Halloween to "Harvest". I'm not a big wreath girl, but I've been watching some of the homes around us with their doors looking rather festive and I decided that if I could find the right one that spoke to me I would go there. I mean, how else are you supposed to get your house ready for Thanksgiving? A wreath does a pretty good job welcoming your guests for turkey-time. Long story short, I found a glittery, acorn, pinecone, silver leafy wreath that was perfectly me, if I had to deviate from the norm. But since it was of course neutral in color, that left my pumpkin sticking out like a sore-thumb on our porch. Well, that left me with no other choice than to monogram the sucker! I'm really happy with the outcome and my small success of Friday afternoon, so I'd like to share with you my super easy how-to on pumpkin monogramming and how you yourself could turn your harvest friend from sad to fab.

This was my pumpkin before; you could see why it needed some life shot in it.

Before

First, I tried to be frugal so I just used some left-over house paint we had in our utility room to paint the base of the pumpkin. You can certainly use any sort of paint you want, in any color you want, but just FYI, I used Sherwin Williams 'devine white'. In the photos you can see that on my first attempt I used foam brushes. Bad decision. Just go with any normal bristle paint brush.. it'll save you some headaches.

As my pumpkin was drying, I took a photo of it on my porch and uploaded it into Photoshop so I could play around with the font I wanted to use for my monogram. 

It looked like this.

You can basically do this on any program that allows you to type on top of a jpeg. You can even skip this step if you're not so OCD about this kind of stuff like I am. I figured 2 minutes of time to visualize the end product will save 15-20 extra minutes of printing out multiple letters as I go thru each one shaking my head. Curse of the designer.

Once you figure out what font your letter will be, pull up a new 8x11 document in either Word, or like I used Photoshop. The easiest way to do this, (which may not be so easy for you, and by any means please proceed with the best way you deem better) is to fill your letter to the entire page. Then if you're in Photoshop, press control+click the layer with your letter in it to select. Go up to the top and drop down "Select">"Modify">"Expand".... make it say 2 pixels. (You could do 1 or 2, no more.) Next step, create a new layer. Make sure the layer is active, click black for color, and then click the paint bucket tool, and fill inside your letter (it should still be selected). Press control+D to deselect. Take the layer that your original letter was on and drag it to be on top. Change the font color to white so you are then left with only an outline like my photo below. 

using just an outline helps save printer ink

If you are only using Word, then just typing the letter to fill your page and then going into the font settings to click 'outline' to change it to just being an outline of the letter. My word for mac did not have this setting which is why I used Photoshop. Some older versions of word still have it though, you just have to see if yours does. Also, printing just the letter is fine, it just uses a ton of unnecessary ink.

Cut your letter out and tape it to your pumpkin. Trace with a pencil the outline of your letter so it can serve as a guide when you're painting. 

You can do the monogram in any color you like, but I think black really stands out and looks clean. I used one of those little acrylic paints from Michael's to paint my letter. I also didn't have a tiny paint brush so I used my smallest foam brush. It didn't leave me with a clean line, but I ended up liking it better because since I used a script, it made it look like calligraphy. Score. I love when things like that work in my favor.

When you're done you should have something like this.

After

You can go ahead and dress it up as you like. I took some baker's twine to give it a little bow and drug over some crunchy leaves that were in my flower beds to play up the harvest decor.

My only advice is to make sure you bring your pumpkin in during rainy days. We don't have many here so I'm in luck. When we do get a sprinkle I just bring it closer to the door so it's covered from the heavy stuff. It would probably hold up, but I wouldn't take a chance after all that hard work. How devastating to see an orange pumpkin again with all the paint in a puddle on your porch!