Straw Pumpkin

I made another pumpkin for our patch today!

The base is another of the foam carvable pumpkins from Dollar Tree. These have been bases for many of my pumpkins.

I lightly spray-painted the foam pumpkin with white paint, just to make the orange less bright because some of the orange was going to show through the holes of the straw ribbon.

The braided straw material came from a summer hat, also bought from Dollar Tree. It was very easy to find the end of the spiral on the brim and pull the hat apart into the long straw ribbon. Then it was a matter of cutting the ribbon to length and hot gluing the strips to the pumpkin.

Once the pumpkin was covered, I took the very crown of the hat, cut it down, and glued the circular piece to the bottom of the pumpkin to cover the untidiness where all the straw ribbons meet.

For the stem, I covered a piece of a skewer with twine, poked the point of the skewer into the top of the pumpkin, frayed some of the twine at the base of the stem, and glued the twine together at the top of the stem. While the glue was drying, I curved the tip of the stem over and held it in place with a rubber band. Once the glue dried, the stem stayed curved at the top.

I added this straw pumpkin to the patch in our entryway. It's nestled between my beaded pumpkin and my painted jar pumpkin.

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I got directions and inspiration for the straw pumpkin from this video by Justin Wray.