Earlier this month I made a pumpkin garland from a vintage book. It’s a craft I’ve wanted to make for a while, and I took the garland to my office and hung it on my desk (the office girls went crazy with the Halloween decorations this year!). Making your own decorations is fun and a good way to recycle paper as I try to limit the craft supplies we have at home now the kids are older. I also wanted to make some gold foil pumpkin decorations, similar to the DIY gold foil eggs we made at Easter time.

When we made our own gold foil eggs we carefully re-used the tubes from tomato and garlic puree (you can see the instructions on how to re-use tubes here). They were super simple to clean and use, but for our gold foil pumpkins we tried metallic foil sheets from the craft shop.

You will need the following items:

Metallic foil sheets

Embossing pen with 4 different sized tips

Scissors

Pumpkin cookie cutter or shape

We used a pumpkin cookie cutter to make our shapes but you can draw freehand. Carefully mark out the shape using the embossing tool, press hard enough to create a crease that you will be able to cut out.

Carefully cut out your pumpkin shape using scissors. Discard any waste material, you can carefully press them into a ball so they are easier to recycle).

Then comes the fun part where you can decorate your metallic pumpkin any way you want. Our embossing tool has 4 different sizes of point so we used the larger point to create lines to give the pumpkin shape, then the smaller point to add detail. If you make any mistakes you can smooth down the foil and go over it again.

The shiny foil decorations go well with our vintage papers pumpkins. They would also look great hung up on some branches, or in a twinkling banner hung over the fireplace.

These are fun to make, especially for older children. They will last for years, and age well as they soften and dull slightly with each year. Let me know if you’ve tried them!