What to do with a styrofoam pumpkin

2008-06-13T05:26:00.000-07:00

I bought some of those fake pumpkins for jack o'lanterns for Holloween and wondered if it would be hard to turn one into a dollhouse. It wasn't as simple as I thought it would be, but I like the way it turned out.
After I finished fooling around with the actual pumpkin, I glued it to a platform and stepped cut up sponges around it as a base. I used my usual landscaping mixture of assorted types of sponges and reindeer moss. By the way, you can tint the reindeer moss to alter its color. I had a package of dark and one of light. I tinted some of the light moss to bring in another shade of green to the mix. I looked for some smaller leafed ivy and glued it in a trailing fashion to the pumpkin and the base. I thought the flowers made a good accent. The steps are once again made of scrap wood. the two thicker ones were out of a piece of balsa wood I had laying around.

Here's a side view. I wanted the window to have an olde glasse look. I sprayed the plastic "glass" with Krylon matte finish, then I used a marker to draw on some leading in a haphazard fashion. I got the idea from a still from a Disney fairy tale movie.

Here's the inside. I have to admit it sort of stymied me as I started working on it. My original concept was for something else alltogether, but it turned out that it was going to be a heck of a lot more effort than I wanted to put into it. The outside would have been totally different too. I wanted this to be a simple project that I could finish easily. Once I decided to make it into a sort of garden house I painted a different floor , but once I decided to paint a mural I decided the floor would look too busy so I painted it out. I still may use the design someday. I wanted a light and tried a couple of different things. They were all too bright til I hit on the fiber optic kind. I just cut them short and bent them a bit. The hard part was making a hole in the stem so I could push the thing through. The cord is hidden on the outside by the ivy. The table and chairs were a set from Dollar Tree.
You know....after all the trouble I went through to run in that light, I find I don't like it after all and I might remove it.

The Pumpkin House

What to do with a styrofoam pumpkin