Halloween Pumpkin Face Pins
Happy Halloween! If you’re reading this post today, it is finally Halloween! This fall has been such a fun time of year, but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t getting more and more excited for the Holiday season to begin soon! But before we begin on all the Christmas content and Holiday gift guides, I wanted to post one more Halloween project idea that I did this year that I thought turned out super cute.
I intended for this post to go up sooner so that you all could try out this DIY for yourself this season, but life got in the way. So pin this one for later because its so easy and can be used for years to come!
I’m always looking for inspiration for cute ways to decorate pumpkins for Halloween. Carving pumpkins is classic but it quite messy and labor intensive. Painting pumpkins can be fun but I can never think of what I want to paint. I love the trend of decoupaging a pumpkin, but I’ve seen that everywhere and wanted to do something unique. So I found my inspiration through the classic Mr. Potato Head toy, and decided to make some pumpkin face pins that I could push into my pumpkins and then just remove, clean, and use again next year!
I made these cute nose, mouth, and eye shaped pins with polymer clay and painted them with a cute color palette and fun little details! It was so easy and I think it adds a whole lot of personality to my pumpkins at my door this year! Check out how I made them below :)
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DIY HALLOWEEN PUMPKIN FACE PINS (MR. POTATO HEAD PUMPKIN DECORATING)
Supplies:
Pumpkins (assorted sizes, shapes, and colors)
Polymer clay (I used Sculpey III in white)
Clay roller or rolling pin
Knife or clay tools (a set like this is good for lots of projects)
Parchment paper
Acrylic paint (in assorted colors)
Paint brushes
Flat head upholstery tacks (I used the 11*17mm size)
White cardstock paper
Scissors
ETI’s Halloween Pumpkin Face Pins Template PDF (download below!)
STEP 1: To begin, download the ETI Halloween Pumpkin Face Pins Template PDF (above!) and print on a thick white cardstock paper. Carefully cut out all the shapes that you want to make out of clay. There are a bunch of shape options so get creative with your combinations of nose, mouth, eyes, and any other facial features you want to make!
Also, preheat your oven to 275 degrees F (or whatever temperature the instructions of your clay says to do).
STEP 2: Pull off a chunk of your polymer clay and knead it in your hands for a while until it is pliable. Roll it into a ball and then carefully roll the clay flat with your rolling pin. I like to lay a clean piece of wax paper on my surface to prevent too much dust from getting in my clay and also to make clean up easier.
You want your clay to be about 1/8” thick. To get a consistent thickness, I like to use two paint stirrers on either side of my surface. Then I roll the pin along the paint stirrers.
STEP 3: Next, you are going to lay your eyes, nose, or mouth shapes on your flat clay piece and use a sharp object to trace the outline of the shapes. Peel back the paper template and then you can go in with a knife or clay tool to carefully cut out the shape from the clay.
Pull away any extra clay until you are left with just your shapes. Repeat with as many shapes as you want! Make sure you trace any eye shapes twice so you have two (unless you want to do some kind of one-eyed monster!) :)
NOTE: If you do the eyeball with the eyelashes, be sure to trace this template twice, once on the front side and once on the back, so that you have two mirror-image eyes.
STEP 4: Once you are happy with all your shapes, you are going to want to do some smoothing out of the edges. I just carefully picked the clay shapes up with my hands and used my fingertips to gently smooth out any rough areas or round any edges.
Lay your clay shapes out on a parchment-paper lined baking sheet.
Stick the baking sheet in the oven for about 15 minutes (or follow the baking instructions on your particular polymer clay packaging).
STEP 5: Let your clay pieces cool completely and they should now be hardened shapes!
Now comes the fun/creative part. Decorating your shapes! You can paint these however you want, solid colors, patterns, or even add details. I found that it’s best to work with thin even coats of paint and allow the paint to dry between each coat. Some of my acrylic paint colors took 3-4 coats of paint to get the color opaque over the polymer clay.
STEP 6: Once your paint is dry, you can glue on your pin backs. I used upholstery tacks for this part because I found that they were sturdy and long enough to securely push into my pumpkins.
Squeeze a tiny dot of E6000 glue onto the back of your tack and push the back of the tack into the back of each shape. On some of the bigger shapes I used two tacks for a little extra security when pushed into the pumpkin.
Allow the glue to cure overnight.
Here are how all my pins turned out! I played around with different combinations depending on the size and color of my pumpkins and then I easily pushed these pins into the pumpkin to build my cute faces!
I love how these quirky little faces turned out! And I also love that I can just pull these out, clean them off, and put them away for next year’s pumpkins. Although, now I’m brainstorming more and more shapes that I want to make next year. How cute would a little bow look up in the corner of the face!!
I hope you guys loved this fun Jack-o-Lantern alternative, let me know if you are going to try it out. Wishing you a fun & safe Halloween night!
xo Rachael
