I wanted a project I could complete in a week or so, and recently saw a bunch of youtube videos making wooden pumpkins, so I decided to try that out and take the opportunity to create something Anna can help with, too.
I went with some cedar fence pickets for the material since they were fairly cheap and had about the correct width for the pumpkins I wanted to make. This was the initial design:
I knew I wanted a stem which was at least a bit hand-made, a lid that was a bit bigger than the pumpkins body, and ~12” height. The bottom is open so that you can place a tea candle (electronic obviously, not open flame) under it and have it light up. A slightly more elaborate sketch of the front and side is:
That sketch was actually made just now, well after the pumpkins were finished. At the time, I was working off a mostly mental design which had some hiccups but turned out well in the end. I drew the sketch more for completeness and to have a better idea of it in case I make more next year.
I spent some time cutting and sanding the first couple, and eventually decided that maybe they didn’t have to be sanded and the rougher surface would be better. In retrospect, this was a mistake - they looked nice, still, but they were much harder to paint (the paint didn’t take as well, left little gaps where the grain folded over, etc) and the overall effect didn’t look as nice as the rustic vision I had of it. In the future, I’d defintely sand them down with ~80grit on the RO sander at least to start with.
Glue-up was difficult, since these were fence posts that were almost universally bowed to one side or the other, which meant that cutting flat edges on them for glue-up was all but impossible. My lack of clamps didn’t help much, but really the bigger issue is that I rushed it and tried to glue 4 of them at once, leading to a lot of wasted effort and un-square glue-ups.
Once the box component was glued, I cut some 2x4 down to make small stems. The first stem I spent a bunch of time making it hang over, be elongated and bent, etc on the strip sander, but it was incredibly time consuming and I honestly don’t think I like the look of it as much as the later ones that I made more squat, straight, and square. The square-effect of the pumpkin actually clashed a bit with the more “organic” but still somewhat manufactured look of the stem. The other 5 stems I just made into a profile more like what is in the sketch above.
Anna and I got some Orange, Black, and Brown paints at the hardware store and wound up doing the bodies in orange, black lines (neither of us liked the lines and probably wouldn’t do them again), and brown stems. The overall effect is very nice. We put them out along the low wall in the front yard with LED flickering tea candles and it came out really well:
Daylight:
Night:
Design Improvements
If I were to make these again, I’d definitely make the lids smaller with less overhang especially on the sides. I’d also sand everything even if it’s a bit more work, so that glue-ups and paint take better. I’d also make the pumpkins slightly smaller in height, or else slightly wider on the faces/sides to give them a more spherical profile, and I’d make the faces bigger to have a better aspect ratio. Currently, all the faces seem a bit squashed vertically since the pumpkins are relatively tall compared to their width.
Really, though, if I were to make wooden pumpkins for halloween decorations again, I’d spend more time and design them with faces that can be swapped out, probably with a tongue-and-groove on each side of the face where it mates to the side. that way, I could make the main body of the pumpkins once, and “carve” faces every year after that. I’ll probably do a simple design for this sometime soon because it doesn’t seem like it would be very hard. If I do this, I’d definitely fix the aspect ratio thing above, since as a secondary problem it makes the LED candles not illuminate the faces as well as I’d like (because they’re sitting far below the sight-line of the carved sections, but not very far back like they would be in a rounder, squatter real pumpkin).
Lessons Learned
- Plan how I will arrange, hold, and clamp glue ups in advance
- Take more time in planning cuts and ensuring squareness especially of mating surfaces for glue-ups