Primitive Wood Pumpkins

Here's another of my "I saved this video for over 5 years, so maybe it's finally time to make this craft" projects. It's also another of the 24 Goals in 2024 projects where I use items already at hand to create my crafts.

These adorable pumpkins are made from the Tumbling Towers blocks from Dollar Tree's toy department. Tumbling Towers is a take-off on Jenga. Many crafters uses these small wood blocks in innovative ways for their crafts. The game I have on hand has two colors of blocks, the raw wood and the dark brown. 

The pumpkins also use 1/2 inch wood cubes from the Crafter's Square department at Dollar Tree. 

I first painted the wood blocks with acrylic paint. I made white, orange, raw, and brown pumpkins. I painted the 1/2 inch cubes green for the stems. I attempted a dry brush technique to add painted details, which was somewhat successful.

I used floral wire twisted around a pen to make the tendrils. Everything is held together with hot glue.

I didn't have any small leaves left in my floral supplies, so I made my own. I found a green cotton fabric with a small leaf pattern in my stash. Since the fabric was somewhat floppy, I backed it with fusible interfacing. Using a pumpkin leaf pattern I found online, I cut the leaf shape from the stiffened fabric.

Here you can see the fusible interfacing on the back of the leaf. 

I'm extremely pleased with the result. Now there are more pumpkins in my patch!

This is the video tutorial I used for inspiration:

Pro tip ... if you're going to use Excelsior to style your photo, don't put it on top of a felt or velvet backdrop. Holy cow! What a mess! 

After I picked up the big bits with my hands, I tried using a lint roller to get the small pieces. That didn't work well, so I turned to my hand-held vacuum. That did most of the job. To gather the tiny bits I swept them together with a fingernail bush, then resorted to tweezers to pick the straw out of the fabric nap and get them to the trash can.

Never again!  😮