Book Page & Wire Pumpkins

Continuing Pumpkin Week...

with Book Page & Wire Pumpkins

I told you I'd be on a book page kick after doing that Central Command Station!

For Pumpkin Week, I hit up the Dollar Tree for a few fake pumpkins, got out my spray adhesive, book pages, and mod podge.  Most of this I had already, so it was only $4 worth of foam pumpkins.

First, I pulled the plastic stems out of the mini pumpkins.

Then I ripped out a bunch of book pages and trimmed them on each end in toward the center.  I left a horizontal chunk across the center of the page, and cut about 1 1/2" sections vertically from the top and bottom margins, toward the center but not all the way through.  This gives you some adjustment room for gluing a rectangle onto a round shape.  Won't eliminate the wrinkles entirely, but it does help.

I laid my book pages on an old piece of posterboard and gave them a light coat of spray adhesive.  Then one at a time, I placed the center of the page across the body of the pumpkin, and started smoothing the strips so they wrapped up and down to cover the pumpkin.  I started in the middle, then smoothed the outer strips overlapping on top.  I kept doing this till the whole pumpkin was covered.  I think the little ones took three pages each.

Same process for the larger pumpkins.

There were a few spots where I had to put a small ripped piece of book page to cover a gap or tear, 

along with around the stem area, but most of it was covered with the full page.

You probably could leave them just like this, if your spray adhesive evenly covered the whole book page.  I chose to add a topcoat of mod podge to mine.

This time, I did use the pushpin method on the bottom (thank you Pinterest), 

to keep the pumpkins raised off the surface of the table while they dried.

Once these had dried, I added curled wire stems.

Unfortunately, I have no clue what gauge this wire is.  It's not craft wire though.  

It's pretty hefty stuff that I found in the Hub's tool stash.  Fairly thin, but hard to cut and bend.  

I'm all for using what you have, so I went with it.

For the larger pumpkins, I wrapped lots of wire around a glue stick 

that was about the same circumference as the stubby foam stem on the pumpkin.  

Then I slid the coil off the end of the stick and it was shaped.

When I cut it, I left a good eight inches or so of straight wire off the top. 

I twisted the whole coil tight together (think screwing a cap on).

This long tail gets poked down through the center of the coil and out between the wires about 1/4" from the bottom.  This helps keep the coil compacted once it is attached to the pumpkin.

Fit the wire coil over the stubby foam stem of the pumpkin (this takes some wrangling), 

and curl the short wire right into the foam body of the pumpkin to hold it.

You can now adjust the height of the new wire stem by how tight you pull that wire that comes down through the center of the coil.  When you get it how you like, poke that remaining end of wire down into the foam of the pumpkin as well.  Helps to curl it a little.

You can grab the entire coiled stem and turn it like a screw to secure it firmly into the foam.

Then you can form the coil a bit to get it pumpkin-y.  I thought it looked like it should have been

 a little thinner, but I didn't have anything inbetween that glue stick and a pencil to wrap it around.  

I added a few curling tendrils to the base of the stem by coiling a short piece of wire around a pencil, 

and poking it into the foam.

For the mini pumpkins, I made a tighter pencil coil, left one tail on the bottom, 

and poked that into the foam on the minis.  These were small and dense enough to keep 

their shape without the top tail poking down through the center.

Done!  Except I did one last touch on the two large pumpkins.  Last year, I had some Halloween silhouettes that I had traced and cut out of black cardstock.  I taped them onto thin craft wire 

and had the witches flying above the Toilet Paper Roll Pumpkins that my boys made in preschool. 

I thought these would look great with my new book page & wire pumpkins, 

so I just twisted the end of the wire onto the stem and shaped them where I wanted them to fly.

I'm so excited to do my Halloween Mantle now!  I think the witch silhouette totally makes it!

Sharing @

Linkin' with Lil'Luna