Blogtoberfest Day 18
I was in Archiver’s about a month ago looking at new scrapbook products and saw a pretty 3D pumpkin they had made. The store was out of the printed instructions for it, so I took a good look at the sample and came home to try my hand at recreating it. Here is what I produced and what I learned along the way.
Gather your supplies: cardstock, adhesive, hot glue gun, scoring board, stamps and inks
Rather than use printed patterned paper for this I wanted to create my own with cardstock and stamps. For one thing, I really don’t use this technique very often, and I wanted to stretch myself creatively. Second, I wasn’t at all sure how many pieces of paper the pumpkin would take to finish (it ended up being 5), so I thought it would be a good idea to be able to make more as I needed it. I have amassed quite a collection of doily stamps since that trend began (but haven’t used them as much as I’d like), so I decided to pull them all out for this project. I selected a number of beautiful distress ink colors and set to work creating my patterns. Aren’t those doilies yummy?
Cover your cardstock with stamped images.
This pumpkin is made of stacked rosettes, so I knew I would be doing a lot of scoring. To save myself time I scored each whole 12×12 piece of paper at one time (every half inch) and then cut it into strips. To make this stack into a sphere shape requires making rosettes of graduating sizes. I have listed all the strip sizes below. Each rosette is made with 2 strips of equal width, so cut 2 of each size.
Score the whole 12x12 page at once before cutting the strips you need.
Number and size of paper strips needed to complete the pumpkin rosettes
| Strip width | # Strips | # Rosettes |
|---|---|---|
| 2 inches | 2 | 1 (for the bottom of the stack) |
| 2-1/4 inches | 4 | 2 |
| 2-1/2 inches | 4 | 2 |
| 2-3/4 inches | 4 | 2 |
| 2-7/8 inches | 4 | 2 |
| 3 inches | 2 | 2 |
Accordion fold all strips and create your rosettes. I figure that rosettes are so common in paper crafting these days that many of us have made them before, so I’m not including instructions for that part of this project. However, there are probably hundreds of tutorials out there on how to make these little beauties—both in video form and still photo/text—if you haven’t yet tried your hand at them.
Cut all your various strips and accordion fold them.
Once you have a stack of rosettes, apply hot glue to the center disk of cardstock on each one and adhere them together. Start with the smallest rosette and stack gradually larger circles until you’ve used the largest one, and then start decreasing again. Once you’ve used all your rosettes, you’ll have your base pumpkin shape completed! Here is the order to follow:
- Bottom of the stack: 2-inch rosette
- Next up: 2-1/4 inch
- 2-1/2 inch
- 2-3/4 inch
- 2-7/8 inch
- 3 inch
- 2-7/8 inch
- 2-3/4 inch
- 2-1/2 inch
- Top rosette: 2-1/4 inch. I preferred to leave off a top 2-inch rosette to avoid making my pumpkin look too much like a pineapple!
Stack the rosettes to create the pumpkin shape.
Cut two 1-1/2-inch strips of paper for your pumpkin’s stem. Apply wet glue to one side of the cardstock and start rolling it into a tight cylinder. When you’re about to the end of the first strip, slide in the second and keep rolling. Wrap rubber bands around the roll until it dries.
Apply glue to 2 long strips of cardstock and roll them tightly.
Now it’s time to add some flair to the stem. Cut another 1-1/2-inch strip of the same paper and snip fringe along its entire length. To make sure that I had enough room to apply my glue to the bottom of the strip, I drew a line to guide my fringe cutting. Then wrap the fringe around the bottom of the stem. Bend, curl and primp that fringe until it suits you.
Cut one more 1-1/2-inch strip of paper to use for the fringe.
I used my Silhouette to cut some maple leaf shapes. To add texture I ran them through a crimper then spritzed them with a few colors of Glimmer Mist. Pretty!
I cut out some maples leaves, ran them through a crimper and misted them.
Add the leaves (I used three) with glue dots. I also cut some very thin strips of paper, curled them and glued those at the top center.
Use glue dots to add leaves and curly-ques to the top of the pumpkin.
Use hot glue to secure the stem to the base. You’re finished! And you have a beautiful fall decoration to add to your home. 🙂
Once you add your leaves and stem, your pumpkin is complete!
It occurs to me that one last step that could really add a lot to our little pumpkin is to spritz it with a few hits of pearl Glimmer Mist. I may still do that to mine!
You know that if you make one of these I need to see it. Please leave me a comment with a link to your version. I really enjoyed making this little guy, and I hope you’ll give it a try.
