Pumpkins and Owls

It's no secret that I love owls. They have become increasingly popular over recent years and can be easily found in all kinds of stores and decor. Owls used to be used as scary Halloween decor once upon a sad time, but now have a nice place among fall decor without being ghoulish or creepy. I have included some of my owls in my fall decorating and they fit right in! So in my last blog post you saw a peek at some of my decor, some of them being pumpkins. Pumpkins are my most favorite thing about fall!! The options with them are endless when it comes to decorating them and I had a large blank white one that I couldn't decide what to do with at the time. Enter good ol' trusty Pinterest. After lots of great ideas, this was my favorite!

Cute isn't it?? Owl pumpkins made with a large white pumpkin (real or craft), and some sunflower seeds!! Supplies needed: a large white pumpkin, sunflower seeds, a hot glue gun, and a craft/utility/pumpkin-carving knife.
There are a couple ways to carve into these bad boys, my pumpkin was a craft one, and therefore already hallow and made of foam. If you have a real one, you have to do the drill of opening a gutting out the pumpkin, same way you would be prepping for any jack-o-lantern. I assume the easiest way to do this would be using the drill gun with a large drill bit to make the holes for the eyes, but our drill gun hates me and decided to kill over as soon as I touched it. So I used a serrated steak knife (not the most appropriate or sophisticated tool for the occasion but it gets the job done and it's all I had on hand).

Since my drill committed suicide, I carved out the holes by hand, once I had the general hole I twisted the knife around to scrape it evenly. Next step is carving the "beak" by carving out a simple upside-down triangle.

Now the fun part, start hot-gluing the seeds with the fatter sides around the outside of the eye holes. The original Pinterest picture showed two rows of the seeds, to which I tried just two but ended up fulling in the gaps probably more than I should have.

When you are satisfied with how it looks, do the same for the next eye and try to make it as even looking as possible.

Last step is the ear tufts on top of the pumpkin on the upper outer corners of the eyes. I failed to take photos of this step because I got side-tracked with my kids begging for me to feed them, I'm sorry :( But its pretty simple, use two seeds as the base placing them in a "V" shape and put a huge glop of hot glue directly onto the pumpkin and stick the seeds on and hold for a few seconds until the glue is hard enough to hold the seeds without assistance. Repeat the step with two more seeds on top of the first row, then top it off with a single seed placed in the middle of the "V" on top.
For the "claws," just hot glue a group of 3 seeds (2 pointing outward in an upside down "v" and a single seed in the middle of the "v" also pointing down).

Here is my finished product! Since this is a craft pumpkin, I'm pretty sure I can't use a real flame candle on the inside to light it up, so I used a cheapie LED tea-light candle that sadly is supposed to be lighting it up in the photo, but that's as bright as it could get. So I would recommend a better, stronger LED tea-light to illuminate this guy. Do you have any creative ideas for decorating pumpkins in unusual ways? I would love to hear some of your ideas in the comments below!