Cement pumpkins

On a beautiful day last week, during open hooking at our shop some of the ladies and I decided to make some of the fabulous cement pumpkins we have seen all over pinterest and facebook.  So I scoured the stores for the plastic pumpkin "molds" and found some at our local Walmart and some smaller ones at a dollar store.  

I went to Lowes and asked them what would be a good consistency cement and a young man who thought it was "so cool" guided me to the mortar mix....

So, we started mixing....

We wanted the consistency of peanut butter...

Once we got the right consistency we started filling our pumpkins.  It is important to look for pumpkins that have the shape of the pumpkin inside the pouring area.  We bought some "carvable" pumpkins at the dollar store and though we got little round pumpkins, they did not have any definition "bumps".  

For the stems we wanted some different things.  Annette brought over some rusty railroad ties.  I have some spindly grapevine and some wooden spindles.  

With the consistency of the cement being like peanut butter we pounded the pumpkins down to ensure that they cement filled in all areas and no air bubbles would be there.  We then stuck in our stems......

I wanted to use unique wooden spindles for my pumpkin stems...

                             ......but the railroad ties are very cool too..........

                                                     ......oh yes, I do like the spindle!

                              Probably the worse part of this whole project was cutting off the plastics.  I highly recommend cutting it off in sections.  As you can see below I probably went a little bit too high with my cement but, I still like it.  You can dry brush your cement with orange paint, but I decided to leave mine alone.  Perhaps they'd be neat with some mossy growth on them, which can be achieved by rubbing yogurt all over and letting them "age" and grow the moss outside.

Voila!!  I just love them.  

Until next time.....