DIY Cheap and Easy Pumpkin Arch
Back to our regularly scheduled programming
Thanks to all of you for following along on my journey this summer and to those of you who helped me raise so much money for the Ehler’s-Danlo’s Syndrome. Now that I’m back home and we’ve hurled straight into spooky season, I will bring us all back to our regularly scheduled programing: Stuff I make.
So to start off the most wonderful time of the year, I want to share with you a very affordable and easy to make pumpkin arch! Above is our sweet Ms. Nova modeling the finished product for us. Here is it all lit up at night:
First, we clearly went to the store and got the essentials:
Side note: we got home and played our first round of Jumanji, and just as we rolled the dice, some raccoons or something in the attic went off very loudly. Coincidence? The game clearly works.
Another day, after we escaped the perils of the game successfully, I began by removing the handles and drilling a quarter sized hole in each pumpkin (for the lights and pole to go through) and a smaller .5 cm hole for each. The little hole is located in a spot so that when it rains, the pumpkin will not fill with rain.
Next, I simply strung the pumpkins and lights through a PVC pipe measured to fit the gateway where we wanted the arch – a very strange size.
Since the gateway you see is particularly wide, we did struggle with figuring out how to attach it; we could have used weighted pots, but we chose to secure it with metal fasteners to the hinges of the gate. We also found out after a few days that the 100-degree direct sunshine was a tad too much, and it began melting during the day; not the pumpkins, but the pole was drooping. We fixed this by using a black metal bar to hold up the center. I was bummed about this at first, but I decorated it with a giant spider web and spider and it worked out ok.
As you can see, this arch was SO cheap and simple to make (99 cent buckets, $2 PVC pipe, lights we already had) and so cute! Not everything has to be grand, expensive, or hard to make. Stay tuned for more of my Spooky Season creations!
Haylan