Fabric Mod Podge Pumpkins – FAIL

I’ve been seeing fabric Mod Podge* pumpkins circulating the web and thought that they were super cute. When my neighbor sent me yet another link last week about these fabulous looking pumpkins, I decided I was going to give it a shot! I went to Dollar Tree and got a couple of pumpkins and then headed over to Walmart where I found some fabric in the clearance section. SCORE. I paid about $2 for a little over a yard of fabric.

You might have noticed that I put “FAIL” in my title. Well, I’ll tell/show you why and then add my two cents about what I would do differently next time.

To get started you will need the following:

Pumpkin (Mine is just a foam pumpkin from Dollar Tree, as mentioned above.)
Fabric of your choice
Scissors (I used a rotary cutter.)
Ruler
Mod Podge* (I used Matte.)
Foam brush (I got mine at Dollar Tree. It came as a pack of ten or something like that. Don’t buy expensive ones because you’ll probably just throw them away when you’re done.)

First, cut your fabric into strips. I did mine in two inch strips.

Here is a closer look at my clearance fabric. Cute right? =]

Now, you want to take your Mod Podge and paint a stripe down your pumpkin where your strip of fabric will go. Be pretty generous with this.

Lay your fabric strip down and Mod Podge over it as well. This will help seal it and keep it flat.

Continue all the way around until it looks something like this.

I had some strings hanging all over the place so I ended up cutting them off/Mod Podge-ing them down so they wouldn’t stick out.

Here is my finished product on my porch shelf. I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it.

Okay, so the reason I say “FAIL” is because the instructions seem easy enough, but this project was actually a little difficult.
Here are some things I would recommend doing differently:

1. Make your strips thinner. It may take you a little longer to complete, but it will probably look a lot better. I found that using two inch strips made it hard to lay the fabric flat against the bumps and ridges of the pumpkin.

2. I wouldn’t recommend doing your strips from top to bottom. I would go from the top to the middle. Once you start doing top to bottom, there’s no way to set the pumpkin down to keep moving around the pumpkin. (I ended up cutting my strips in half and then even had to cut some smaller strips to get to places where the fabric wouldn’t lay flat because my strips were too wide.) Once you set the pumpkin down (with strips going from top to bottom) it starts to stick onto the surface you are working on. I do kind of like the imperfect look though, so it’s completely up to you.

3. I wouldn’t use a white fabric again. Unless you like the orange coming through the fabric. Like I said, I don’t hate it but I don’t love it either. (At least this was a relatively cheap project and I’m not crying about wasting a bunch of money.)

4. This one is completely up to you, but I feel like I should have painted the “stem” brown.

I hope this helps! Do you think you’ll try it?

Here’s another picture of the pumpkin on my shelf. I am going to leave it there for now. It’s not horrible and it does bring some color to the shelf.
Don’t you love my “Believe” star? I do! (Thanks neighbor!)

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