Hardly a day goes by that Stella isn’t painting, coloring, cutting, taping, gluing, and designing her own mini masterpieces. As someone who grew up going to the summer arts camp offered by the Farmington Hills public schools for six years straight, it is so fun seeing Stella love art.
A couple years ago, she made a paper bag pumpkin at the library, painted orange with jack o’lantern features made out of black construction paper. I brought it out with the Halloween decorations this month, and she talked about wanting to make another one.
Today we made three, for her preschool teachers. And thanks to the package of 100 orange-striped paper bags from the Halloween section at Target, we’ll be able to make 97 more if the mood strikes.
How to make paper bag pumpkins
For this craft, all we needed were old magazines (or newspapers), paper lunch bags, decorative ribbon (or yarn), paints in seasonal colors, a glue stick (not pictured…whoops. Don’t call the Pinterest police on me), and black construction paper.
I helped Stella by cutting out triangle and circle shapes for the nose and eyes, and then jack o’lantern mouth shapes, from the black construction paper. We then glued the shapes into the faces we wanted on the front side of an unopened paper bag.
Then I told Stella to “make snowballs” out of the torn-out magazine pages, which she thought was pretty amusing. We put a few of the paper balls into the paper bags to give them a fuller shape.
I then scrunched the opening of the paper bag together and tied the ribbon at the top.
After that, Stella had fun painting each of the pumpkins her own way.
I feel like these fall on the border between keep-forever kitschy cute and future victims of a KonMari strike, but I love that they were quick and easy to make and saved us (okay, me) from an afternoon of endless “Vampirina” episodes.
It really holds its own with a decorative Pottery Barn pumpkin, don’t ya think?