Pinterest Project: Celestial Pumpkins

Another Martha Stewart Halloween project that I'd pinned on Pinterest!

And you actually already saw a preview of it earlier this week, because it's the pumpkins that are on our front porch.

If you look closely at the pumpkins, you can see they look sort of spiky. That's because they were inspired by Martha's celestial pumpkins.

via Martha Stewart

I won't sugar coat it--these were a huge pain to make. Luckily I read the comments on Martha's site, asking if these could be made with foam pumpkins, so I decided to go that route. I'd be a whole lot less happy about how much work these turned out to be if I'd made them out of real pumpkins and they only lasted a few weeks!

To give you an idea of all that is involved in making these, I (of course, like a good little blogger) took photos. My supplies:

I started by sawing a circle in the bottom of the foam pumpkin.

And then did some experimenting with different sizes of drill bits, starting on the small side and working up until I found the right size that would allow a Christmas light bulb to just poke through, but still small enough that it would hold the bulb in place. (And in turn, I had to upgrade to our Skill drill, because our little Dremel couldn't hold the size of drill bit I ended up needing. Thank goodness the Skill drill was good enough, because our cordless drills are a lot heavier, and would have made things even harder.)

Once I figured out my hole size, I made a little guide out of some junk mail, and used a Sharpie to mark where I would drill all of my holes.

Around this point, my husband went and got some safety glasses and insisted I wear them. Drilling messy foam holes is fashionable work, I tell you!

After what felt like forever, clutching the pumpkin between my knees while sitting on the floor, and repositioning it ever few holes, I finally had a holey pumpkin.

Then comes the "fun" of shoving a hundred Christmas lights in the little holes. This was another surprisingly time consuming, sweaty-hand-making step, and I have a blister on my thumb from all the light shoving. Also, I realized after this first pumpkin that I had way too many holes, and it was going to take about 2 strands of 100 lights to fill them all. So....being as this was only the first of 4 pumpkins, I opted to only drill and light the front half of them. Nobody can see the backs on my front steps anyway, and I always have the option to go back and add more holes and lights in the future.

Multiply all of that pain in the ass work by three more pumpkins, and I could finally put them on the porch.

Here they are all lit up at dusk.

And my attempt at photographing them at night. Not an easy task when I don't own a tripod, so I had to try to stand really still and hold my breath to take these pics!

See what I mean about not needing to bother putting lights on the back side of the pumpkins that are against the porch steps?

This was definitely one of the less fun projects I've worked on lately. More like a "oh crap, this is hard, what the heck did I get myself into, but I have to finish and clean up this huge mess on the living room floor, so my husband doesn't kill me" kind of project. But like I said earlier, luckily they're something that I can reuse for years to come, since they're made out of fake pumpkins.

Have you worked on any pain in the ass, a lot harder/more time consuming than you originally thought projects lately? I'm feeling a little burnt out after these pumpkins, and haven't worked on anything else all week!

P.S. My Missoni giveaway ends tonight, so be sure to enter if you haven't already :)