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Looking for an autumn craft, I came across the Instagram account of Timm Sevitz, a former member of the Crate+Barrel display team and a current craft whiz. In one of his posts (https://www.instagram.com/p/CwslWW8rNsj/) he demonstrated little yarn jack o'lanterns. These were geared to children - half a toilet paper roll wrapped with a chunky yarn and then embellished with a twig stem and cut out paper eyes and toothy grins. From my winter attempt at crochet, I had a ball of thick varigated wool felting yarn on hand in appropriate atumnal tones, and I gave it a try.
What captivated me about making these pumpkins (and I hope will interest you, too) is how adapting to the materials available informs what you create. I had limited yarns and often only small quantities of any one yarn. I did try a pumpkin in a single colour - a fuzzy novelty yarn in white.
A special yarn could be saved for just the outer layers - like this one below (and a darker version) found in a thrift store. The label says, "An unusual Irish import textured yarn in a multicolored blend." The under layers were a combination of creams and taupes that coordinated with the textured yarns.
Below, you can see winding the specialty yarn over the under layers.
Another yarn-saving tactic I used was to line the inner side of the toilet paper roll with a folded paper napkin. This bulked up the hole and creating a tight fit for the twig required less yarn. I also remembered making velvet pumpkin pin cushions one year as Christmas gifts. These I'd embellished with wire tendrils. And since I seldom let go of potential craft supplies, I had a box of wire on hand! To create the tendrils, I wound the wire around a pencil and then stretched the spiral a bit to make a more interesting shape.
About this time, I got the idea of making a smaller pumpkin and constructed a little tube from cardstock. (This also works great for the larger pumkins if, like me, you go a bit crazy and run out of toilet paper rolls!)I tore the strips to get a rustic, thready look, although the neat-freak in me was appalled! To get a rounded shape, I padded both the inner core and the outside of the paper roll with scraps of quilt batting. The inner padding made getting the strips through a bit of a pain, but a crochet hook helped.