crafting with the craft-less.

Crafting easily makes it onto my list of top ten things I’m incapable of doing. Other things on said list include using a remote, surviving a haunted house without screaming and attracting every stupid zombie and ax man in there, and waiting until someone’s birthday for them to open my gift.

But the thing is, even though I can’t use a remote I still try. And yes, I end up deleting DVR’d shows and get stuck on the fishing channel but still. I try. And so obviously I still try to craft. And so far, after nearly 25 years, I’m still straight terrible at it. For the life of me, I cannot come up with creative ideas. I could never just think up something cute and crafty. What I can do (sometimes) is copy. I can copy things that more talented crafters have done as long as it doesn’t include anything complicated. I can tie ribbons, I can paint squares and I can use a toothbrush to splatter paint anything you put in front of me.

But a couple weeks ago I decided to stretch my craftabilities and paint pumpkins. Note that the thought of carving pumpkins did not even cross my mind because using a knife on a hard vegetable isn’t on my resume. So I spent like an hour looking at ideas on pinterest for pumpkin painting. Turns out some people can paint complicated things on pumpkins. Jealous. Anyway, I finally found a few things I liked like a simple zig zag or some polka dots. Those seems straight forward, am I right? How could you mess those up?

Obviously you can or this post would be over by now.

So I went to tape off the zig zag for the pumpkin and all was going well until I finished painting it and realized that the whole spherically-shaped pumpkin thing had apparently thrown me off because dear old zig zag was practically at the bottom of the pumpkin. I look at that pumpkin every day now and I cannot figure out how that happened. Spheres, man. They’ll get you.

Polka dots. I only had those foam brushes (you can only invest so much when you’re a self-proclaimed non-crafter) and turns out those are not the easiest brushes to paint circles with. Totes cray, right? So after attempting like three circles and realizing this was a no good situation, I tried to wipe them off. Also a bad idea. Mostly I just smeared white paint all over one side of the pumpkin. So that pumpkin was off to a great start. Next, I tried making a potato stamp. I had read that you could cut the shape you want into a potato and then use that as a stamp. Again, spherical issues. So I ditched that idea real quick and said sorry to the potato for wasting it. Then I spent about 15 minutes looking for something that could be used as a stamp. Searched the whole dang apartment for a small circular item that could survive having paint all over it. After 15 minutes of fruitless searching (apparently the Heperi’s aren’t much into having small circular items laying around…could have something to do with Levi continually purging my piles of random things, who knows), a lightbulb finally came on in my head! The other end of the foam paintbrush! So I mean, winning. Once I realized I could use the end of the paintbrush, ol’ polka dot pumpkin was done in 2 minutes flat. (Except don’t look at the back of it because it’s still a white smeary mess from the foam and potato polka dot attempts).

And then finally, I had one more pumpkin. I had already done the zig zag and I had already done the polka dots. I was pretty sure there were no more shapes I could confidently pumpkin-ify. I scrolled through the ol’ pinterest and saw that some people would tape off and paint the shape of the state they lived in and then put a little heart on it where they lived. I thought about it for a while and then decided I could challenge myself. I mean, Oklahoma is a fairly simple-shaped state. And so I did it. And after a number of tape recalculations after having made the skinny part of OK way too skinny and almost falling into the spherical trap of putting the state too low like I did on zig zag pumpkin, I succeeded. And I painted. And I hearted. And I won! Then I put the shape of Utah on the back because I mean, I lived there for six years and also it’s practically just a square. And I won at that one as well! I maybe would have liked to do California on there, too, but who are we kidding? My crafting capabilities had been maxed out.

And so there you have it. An adventure in crafting for the ultimate non-crafter. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be able to decorate the rest of my apartment using Oklahoma-shaped items. Which is truly a bummer.