We managed to fill an entire weekend based around building pumpkin scarecrows. It was a perfect combination of playing, house chore, family outing, harvesting and lots of arts and crafts.
Pumpkin picking
After a big pancake breakfast, an annual tradition in our family is to go out and pick apples and pumpkins. This year we found a smaller apple farm, that wasn’t as crowded, with a big pumpkin patch. The challenge was for the kids to find pumpkins that were the same size as their heads, because the next day we were going to make kid sized scarecrows
Playing in the leaves
Another component for scarecrow building is lots of leaves to stuff with. Raking leaves suddenly became more important than just a cleaning exercise and everyone had fun. Of course we had lots of fun playing in the leaves and the other kids in our neighborhood came out to play.
How to make a scarecrow
You need:
Leaves for stuffing
Old clothes, pants and shirt or baby sleeper
Stick
Wire, twine or nails
Pumpkins
Wig
Black marker
This is how you do it; tie knots in the ends of the pants and stuff with leaves. Sew the shirt to waist of the pants. Make a whole in the crotch of the pants.
Make a cross out of a stick and shorten the length to match arms. Put the stick through pants and stick in the soil. Put the horizontal stick through the shirt arms. Stuff it with leaves.
Measure pumpkin on the scarecrow. Make sure you do a cut where the head fit best on the scarecrow. We made a hole in the lower back part of the pumpkin so the stick can hold the head up.
Start carving and scooping out the seeds and pumpkin flesh. Use a marker to make a face on the pumpkin. Add decorations to make it scary or happy. We plan on carving out faces on Halloween day and putting lights in them to make them scary.
