Scary Pumpkin Tutorial

Supplies needed:

plastic bag (any size)

newspaper

Wire cutters

Scissors

Wire

String

Dowel/small block of wood

Cardboard egg carton

masking tape

Wallpaper paste (mix with water)

knife

pen/marker

Monster Mud (mix paper insulation with the wallpaper paste)

Glue Gun

cardboard (we used Pepsi and Mountain Dew cases, and they worked really well)

Paintbrush

Latex Paint

-black

-white

-orange

-yellow

-brown

-light brown/tan

Pumpkin light (NOT a candle)

Instructions:

1. Fill plastic bag with crumpled newspaper (we used a Wal-Mart sack for the little one, and 13-gallon trash bags for the larger pumpkins)

2. After tying & taping the bag shut, you will need to stick a piece of wire into the bottom and up through the top. Wind each end of the wire around a 2-3 inch length of a dowel (ours was about 1" thick and 2" long). Hold one dowel while continuing to wind the other one to form the indents in the top and bottom. Secure with tape.

3. With the string (cotton kitchen string works well), make 6-8 creases by just wrapping your string tightly around the bag, and secure both ends with tape. Then, cover all the string with tape. We found that we were able to make the creases deeper as we were taping.

4. If you want a stem, simply take a few separate cups from a cardboard egg carton and stuff eash with newspaper. Place and secure cups one at a time until you have the desired shape and size of your stem.

5. Rip a LOT of newspaper into strips. The bigger the pumpkin, the bigger the strips you can use. Just be sure to have some smaller ones to use on the stem.

6. Mache, mache, mache. Then paper mache some more. You'll need many layers (I think we put on between 8-12).

7. Cut a good sized hole in the bottom of your pumpkin, and pull the bag and all the stuffing out (it works best to put a hole in the bag, pull the newspaper stuffing out, then unstick the bag from the sides).

8. Draw your face on the pumpkin and carve it out.

9. Cut strips out of your cardboard and hot glue the strips to the pumpkin face to the strips stick out about an inch or more.

10. Make your monster mud by mixing the insulation with the wallpaper paste. Use the mud to build up the shape of your pumpkin and the pumkin's face. Be careful not to put too much mud on or your pumpkin will collapse (trust me on this one)!

11. Once it is all dry it needs to be painted. This is the order that worked best for us:

- Do the outside base coat in black

- Paint the inside of the pumpkin - we tried spray paint, but we couldn't bend our arms to get into all the places that needed covering, so we went back to regular paint. We also painted ours black, but I think if we had gone with orange or yellow, they would have been easier to light.

- Dry brush the outside white, then orange

- Use yellow to accent the "humps" on top and around the face.

- You can also dry brush brown or tan into the creases and to help blend the colors together.

- Paint your stem

12. Light up and display!