Pumpkin People Make Great Halloween Decorations

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Neighborhood trick-or-treaters will love your finished pumpkin people!
Neighborhood trick-or-treaters will love your finished pumpkin people!
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The sculptors in our clan generally choose the largest squash for a jack-o'-lantern display, and save the smaller specimens to fashion heads for pumpkin people.
The sculptors in our clan generally choose the largest squash for a jack-o'-lantern display, and save the smaller specimens to fashion heads for pumpkin people.
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Stuff worn-out wearables with hay (or some other filler material) to form a bulky body.
Stuff worn-out wearables with hay (or some other filler material) to form a bulky body.
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Draw a goofy (or glaring!) grimace.
Draw a goofy (or glaring!) grimace.
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Get creative with your Halloween decorating props. For instance, you can deck out your pumpkin people in hats and galoshes.
Get creative with your Halloween decorating props. For instance, you can deck out your pumpkin people in hats and galoshes.

On the last lonesome night of October — when the pale moon hangs cold and heavy in the autumn sky — bands of ghoulish creatures shuffle across the brown stubble of the now fallow fields, restlessly wandering from farmhouse to farmhouse. And stranger still the apparitions utter shrieks of “trick or treat,” as if trying to scare the last withered leaves down from the branches. It sounds like the time to make some great Halloween decorations!

If your household welcomes this annual visit of ghosts and ghouls and other ghastly haunts that go BUMP in the night, the whole brood will probably enjoy creating a friendly (or scary!) family of pumpkin people to delight your masquerading visitors. This fun-filled Halloween project is so easy that even the youngest tot in your home can help out, and the only materials you’ll need are some old clothes, an ample supply of stuffing, a handful of rubber bands, a felt-tipped marking pen, a few well-selected pumpkins from the garden patch and a spark of spooky imagination.

Making Pumpkin People Bodies

Before you can actually begin to construct a host of ghoul-greeters, you’ll have to gather enough worn-out wearables to outfit Ma, Pa and Junior Pumpkinhead (as well as, perhaps, a few of his brothers and sisters). The number of members in your pumpkin people family will determine the amount of clothing required. We generally save up a sufficient supply of well-used duds to enable each “sculptor” in our house to fashion one of the life-sized figures. Old trousers or overalls and long-sleeved shirts or blouses are ideal garments to use because, once such toggery is stuffed, the resulting dummies look remarkably lifelike. However, you can deck out Ma Pumpkinhead in a dress if you first clothe her in pants and then drape a frock over the “pantaloon petticoat.”

Once you’ve assembled an adequate quantity of wearing apparel, you can begin shaping the bodies of your squash-headed relations. Fasten a rubber band around the bottom of each pant leg to close off that opening, and then pack the trousers with some filler material (straw, leaves, rags, or wads of crumpled newspaper are all excellent body builders). Next — using that same technique — secure the shirt sleeves at the cuffs and stuff the arms, then button the front and pad out the chest area.

  • Published on Sep 1, 1981
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