Transforming a Plate--Halloween Decorating at My House Begins

So I love Halloween. I love fall in general, really, but I love Halloween. Anyway, the decorations at the top of our homeschooling/Church books/library bookshelves are all right, but the bamboo plate behind the bottle of potpourri was getting lost in the general wall color. So I decided to do something about it. I was inspired by the vintage pumpkin you can see here.

Here's the plate by itself:

We had too much brown paint left over from the fall tree paintings, so I painted a basketweave pattern on the plate, just to give it some color:

After deciding where the colors would go and tracing the image onto the plate and mixing colors and thinning them forEVer, I ended up with a reasonable replica of the cute vintage pumpkin:

Here's the inspiration piece that I printed out for comparison (and a section of my eight-month pregnant belly):

And here's the plate in its new home. I pulled the metal jack o'lantern forward from its hiding place to make the new vintage one feel a little less lonely.

And there you go.
Happy Halloween!