No-Carve Pumpkins

I'm so glad you all can't see my house right now. We're in the middle of packing because we're moving on Friday. Now before the ones that know me start Facebooking and calling and texting, we are just moving about 5 miles north of our current location...so it should be easy, right? WRONG!!!

How much stuff can one family collect in 3.5 years? I mean, our house is tiny but we seemed to have filled every nook and cranny with STUFF!! When we moved here from another state, it was easy to say, let's just get rid of that or let's sell that, I'm not dragging that across 3 states. But when you're moving 5 miles away, it seems silly to get rid of things that I will "need."  It's funny to see me in the garage trying to get rid of my husbands "necessities" but it's not so funny fighting with him about my craft stuff.

Like I said, my house is tiny (yeah for the bigger new house...with a pool...and a guest room) so as we're pulling all this stuff out of cupboards and shelves, our home has been taken over by boxes. Give-away boxes, book boxes, file boxes, fragile boxes, boxes, boxes, boxes....ahhhhh.

Needless to say, I barely have any extra time. Enter Halloween. Halloween parties, costumes and the ever complicated carving of the pumpkins.

Uh...this year, it doesn't look like I have time to carve pumpkins. Don't get me wrong, I love to carve pumpkins. I usually spend a couple of hours after the kids go to bed carving and scraping. Here's a little sampling of my pumpkins from years past. I'm not amazing, but I love to do it.

Cute Frankenstein

Vampire Kitty

 

Darth

So, see...I love to carve pumpkins. But this year, with the move...no can do. Insert carve-less pumpkin ideas here :)

The first method is just cutting jack-o-lantern parts out of black vinyl or contact paper.

Here, I cut a face out on my vinyl cutter. But I also gave my kids black vinyl and they cut out their own eyes, nose and mouth...and other parts. They are still working on them at press time, so maybe pictures next time.

The other method is what I call the sexy-pumpkin. Using a fishnet stocking, you wrap your pumpkins to give them a stylish, yet festive look.

First you place the pumpkin in the leg. Then you tie the stocking at the stem and you cut off the stocking. Easy, huh?

I think it would look pretty cool with different fishnet type patterns on the pumpkins, but yours truly was too cheap to buy more stockings. I even bought the cheapest stockings in the walmart costume section. If you want to wrap more that one pumpkin, tie a knot in the stocking where you cut if off and wrap another pumpkin.

sorry about the blurry picture

I wrapped all four of these pumpkins in one leg of a stocking. I also tried to do different tension on the wraps to make the holes smaller or larger just to give variety (mainly because I didn't buy more patterned stockings). One thing I really like about this method is that I'll be able to cut the pumpkins open and eat them when Halloween is over. Hubby makes YUMMY Pumpkin squares.

Next week I'll show you how I further decorated these cute pumpkins. Until then, I have a house to move.