This is Halloween from The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack.

I Put a Spell on You by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

We were stuck.  We wanted 6 fake pumpkins, something we could carve, that would last a while, that wouldn’t cost a small fortune.  Surprisingly, searching the Internet didn’t return a whole lot.  I found something called Funkins which sold for about $25 a pumpkin.  A PUMPKIN, for fake foam pumpkins!

Even on sale, we were looking at $84 for 6 pumpkins, and that meant 6 pumpkins that all looked the same.

Yeah… no.  Everyone has seen the amazing Stolloween, and I think most have been intimidated to even try.  I know I was, he makes it look so easy!  That said, we really had no choice, so we gave paper mache pumpkins a try.  I’ll spell out how we did it, and I think you’ll agree, it was a spooktacular (Sorry, I couldn’t resist & I’m kind of lame like that) idea.

We used the same paper mache recipe as the last batch of paper mache pumpkins we made last year.  You remember, the vintage ones.  Yeah, those.  We took grocery bags, filled them with crumpled up newspaper, tied them up, and used tape to make “grooves”.   Toilet paper tubes provided the shape for the stems.  Basically, they oughta look like a pumpkin made out of bag and tape at this point.

Now that you have that done, go on and make your paper mache glue and tear newspaper into long strips.  For life sized pumpkins, we went and did 3 layers of the strip, thoroughly letting each layer dry.  This took us about a day, starting in the afternoon.  Get out a box fan to speed things up.

Now you’re going to have to make your paper mache clay.  We used 6 cups of flour, 1 bottle of elmers glue, a cup of liquid starch (1 cup of water + 1/4 cup of corn starch).  Mix that up and add some GreenFiber Natural Fiber Blow-In Insulation.  A huge cube cost us $7.25 from the Home Depot.  Use as much as you want until you get a thickness you like.  Apply clay to just the tops of the pumpkins.  Note where you’re going to cut your eyes, as this stuff is VERY difficult to cut through.  Drying takes a while but we found a heat lamp really helped things along.  We got a tiny bit of sun that helped us out too, but late September in Ohio = little sun.

Onto the the next day.  Now that the tops are dry, cut a circle in the bottom of your pumpkins and yank out the paper guts, and the bag too.  We left our toilet paper tubes in place.

Not much to see now.  Carve your face, cut some thin cardboard to line your cuts with (think of depth for the eyes and mouth) and get some more clay going, and slather it on.  Let them dry more.

The one up front?  He was named “Lampy” shortly after he made Facebook debut.

We painted the insides of the fake pumpkins orange.

And then we painted the outsides flat black, covering everything well.

It all comes together right now.  This is exactly one week from when we started.  Break out some primer and dry brush your surfaces.

That takes about 5 minutes to dry.  Now get artsy!  I dry brushed as to not overkill the entire project.  A little brown, yellow and orange was all I needed.

And some detail, too:

Time consuming? Yes.  There was 2 of us working on 6 pumpkins and it did take us about a week, doing it leisurely some nights.  Worth it?  Definitely.  They look infinitely better than anything store bought and they cost hardly nothing to make.  Now that’s a treat.

Real Vintage Paper Mache

Click any image to view larger

I love those vintage pumpkin lanterns that go for like $50 on eBay.  If I had billions of dollars and thousands of square feet, I’d probably already own all of them like some weird collector that aims to have the last existing whatever.

Lucky for the rest of the world I have neither.  But I do have newspaper, water and flour.

So Guy and I made our own paper mache lanterns, and I gotta tell ya, they were fun and pretty easy to do!

We made 3 small and one large.  We ended up making the glue like 4 times, but it’s not a big deal.  If you wanna do this, I’ll break down the supplies we used.

* Newspaper, ripped into strips about 6″ – 12″ long
* Assorted balloons from the dollar store
* 2 cups hot water
* 2 cups cold water
* 1/2 cup flour
* 3 tablespoons sugar
* White tissue paper

Heat the 2 cups hot water to boiling.  Meanwhile, mix 1/2 cup flour into 2 cups cold water.  When hot water reaches boiling, mix your cold water/flour mixture into it.  Bring this all back to a boil.  When it’s done, add in your 3 tablespoons sugar.  Mix, wait for it to cool, and enjoy.

paper mache strips

We learned not to “pre-soak” your strips because it pretty much dissolves into unusable snot.  Dip a strip in, wring out the excess glue with your fingers, and slap it down on your balloon.

We placed ours on wax paper with a phone book pressing down so they had a flat top and bottom.  We stuck them in front of a fan.  They dry pretty quick, the top/bottom taking longer, of course.  We ended up putting 2 layers down when I realized I should have rubber banded either the balloon or the covered ballooon while it was wet to make a pumpkin shape.  I slapped some extra on there, and it looked ok.

The general rule is to really let these things dry.  We made these over the course of a few days.  It was fun to get dirty time and time again.  Really!

Next: Pop the balloon, pull it out.

Carving was fun.  We modeled a couple after the vintage lanterns we found on the internet and a couple we just cut typical jack o lantern faces into.

I looked all over the place trying to find the right thing to paint it with.  I was totally paranoid that we’d screw them up and have a pile of sad goo.

We ended up going with colorful latex house paint we had laying around in the basement.  2 light coats (think unsaturated) and you’re in business.

Mix some water with your paint for an aged effect for both the green base and to fill in areas that would naturally have shadows.

We finished by drawing the eyes and mouth on tissue paper, cutting them to size and taping them in.