Fall Decorating: 3 Ways to Use Pumpkins

Hi, I'm Evette Rios, here on eHow.com, and I wanted to share with you guys a few ways that I like to use pumpkins and squash other than just cooking them and eating them. To start, I love these little pumpkins, they're so cute. You can pick these up at any grocery store or just go to your local pumpkin patch and I like to paint them so in order to do that I use a primer. This one happens to be automobile primer but you can use any spray primer and just shake it up a little bit. I'm using a gray primer. The darker primers tend to cover the darker colors of the orange a little bit better and with spray pant you want to keep shaking it until the balls move freely inside, that means the paint inside is fully mixed. And then you ideally want to do this in a well ventilated area, outside is a great place but I'm just going to show you guys and then you let it dry really well. It usually takes a few minutes to dry, 10, 15 minutes, come back and then I'm using some silver acrylic paint. I'm just going to put some right here on my newspaper and then you're just going to paint on top of the dried part of the primer. So you're going to do this, usually about a coat is good because if you've primed it really well the silver is going to look great and then when you're done, I've got one that I did right here, just drill a hole in the top. What I like to use is actually a drill with a hole saw bit is the ideal thing because it makes a nice hole in there and then get out a candlestick holder and just put that right on top and then look at this, with a silver candle, how cool does that look. It will dress up your holiday table and then your friends will think man that is just genius, where does she come up with this stuff, don't worry, I'll never tell. Next idea I love these little pumpkins. These are actually all really good cooking pumpkins. They're sugar pumpkins so these can be reused afterwards and I love projects like that. So just lay out your pumpkins on your table and I kind of laid them out so that they're in kind of interesting shapes and this is going to become my Thanksgiving table centerpiece. So I've got my black paint. I actually just put some right into my little paint tray here and I'm going to grab this pumpkin and you're just going to kind of freehand some letters on here. Of course you could use a stencil if you're worried that your lettering isn't going to be great but you know what, frankly, nobody really cares that much. So just have fun with it and I'm just putting my finishing touches on the A for my Thanksgiving centerpiece that says thanks. How cool is that and I love this idea because you can actually use the pumpkins afterwards. You're not cutting into them so they're perfectly fine. The last idea is these little squashes, you can use pumpkins of course. I love these I think they're just absolutely adorable and you can actually use these as candle holders. So what I did was I just cut a hole on the inside of this. I actually used a knife to cut this one and I used my votive candles as a little bit of a form. So what you do is you take your votive candle out of the little metal shield and you're just going to use this to sort of measure what size, just draw your line around it and then cut your hole about that big. Then you can put your candle right in there and let me light it. So there you go, you've got a great silver mini candle holder using pumpkins that looks really elegant and will add a little pizazz to your holiday table, a great way to use pumpkins to make a centerpiece without having to carve them so you can cook them up later and a way to use to the squash to add a little candlelight to your holiday table. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Evette Rios, here on eHow.com. Happy holidays.