Always up for a crafty challenge, after looking through my October issue of Country Home magazine I decided that it would be fun to attempt the paper mache pumpkins featured on the cover. The instructions looked simple enough - balloons, orange tissue paper, watered down mod podge - I could do that.
Well, this little project did not go as planned. First, the instructions say to dip the strips of tissue paper into the watered down mod podge. What? That did NOT work. The tissue paper pretty much disintegrated upon touching the mod podge mixture (which was not specified, by the way - I guessed at how much water should be added). What worked was painting the mixture onto the balloon with a paint brush, then laying the tissue strips on top of that, then painting another layer of the mod podge. Okay, so we got the balloon completely covered in tissue paper and let it dry.
People, tissue paper is well, thin. I quickly learned that in order for this to work there needed to be MULTIPLE layers of tissue paper over this balloon. All was not lost, so we set out to add more layers to our already tissued balloons. But, then the next problem arose. As the balloons started to lose air, our pumpkin started to implode. At this point the tissue was dry, so we tried to pop the balloons inside, but they were stuck to the paper mache! Is that supposed to happen? We were left with horribly disfigured paper mache pumpkins. I was able to cut a hole in the bottom big enough for my hand to fit through to press the sides out, but they still look pretty crappy and wrinkly. We haven't even drawn faces on them yet. I'd call this a flop. These babies look nothing like the ones in the magazine. Perhaps I'm just a paper mache retard, I dunno.
**after reading the comments on the CH website, it seems I'm not the only one who experienced problems with this project. I guess that means I'm not paper mache inept! If you attempt this project you've been warned!!!
