This week, Miss G and I are participating in a candy play series with several other mamas and munchkins from around the world… Yesterday’s theme was painting – check out our glossy Skittles paint here.
It’s no secret that we absolutely love homemade play dough around here… In fact, we usually have 2 or 3 batches on the go at once, and most often, we pull at least a batch out a day. It’s hard to choose a favourite, but out of all our go-to recipes, I think the marshmallow dough we made this summer was one of the most enjoyed. So when I stumbled upon this recipe for homemade candy corn, it got me thinking… Would the dough be similar? How much of a ‘play window’ would it allow for before it started hardening? Would it easily mould? Well, there’s only one way to find out, now isn’t there?
With a handful of brushes and little containers of purple, green, orange, black, and glow-in-the-dark acrylic paint, Grae got busy beautifying her pumpkin.
It was the best of both worlds, because not only did she get to decorate her pumpkin, but she also got to help us do all of the fun messy parts of carving ours.
After having her fill of icky gunk scooping, it was back to pumpkin painting. She covered the entire thing in a thick layer of paint and then we let it dry overnight.
The next day, we used a little trick I learned years and years ago and cut a hole in the bottom of the pumpkin (no need to mess with trying to get a lit candle in through the top – you simply set your candle down on a surface and place the pumpkin on top). Together, we scooped the insides out and used our apple corer to polka dot the pumpkin’s surface (which worked brilliantly, btw). 
Gracen loves it. It glows just like Mama and Papa’s jack-o-lanterns do, and we were able to preserve almost all of her painting masterpiece.