Kbatz Kraft: Pumpkin Ottomans, Oh Yes

Last Halloween, I shared a video on how to make ‘Puffed Stumpkins.’ This How-to on making your own stuffed pumpkins out of recycled materials was squishy fun for the whole family.

This summer, I again found myself with more stuffed pumpkin making supplies – plenty of plastic bags, recycled denim padding from organic food shipments, and an orange felt-like remnant on sale for $2. When the material seemed too tough for smaller pumpkins, I went big. Instead of a lot of cute little pumpkins the more the merrier in a patch, I cut my material into more realistic large pumpkin sizes.

The preparation is the same, sewing a gathered bottom closed before stuffing and gathering the top and adding twine seams and leaf toppers. I used green Dollar Store twine and cut up floral stems for the leaves, continuing the true to nature look with green accents. A $5 bag of driftwood bowl filler at Wal-Mart provided for realistic stems compared to the curly, glittery pipe cleaners on my smaller jazzy pumpkins. Some of these gnarly bleached pieces I painted brown – a fall color fittingly called “nutmeg” – to go on my previous pumpkins, too, while others I left white to be a contrasting stem on some of the mini black pumpkins.

Two of the four larger pumpkins seemed crooked or wobbly, so I glued them together with more leafy accents between them since stacked pumpkins are popular but expensive. These can be amid the patch or set up on a nice stand when all total these cost less than $10. Of course, since I had more felt fabric, I made one, BIG pumpkin. Charlie Brown size. Big enough to sit on it!

I packed this largest pumpkin pretty firm with plastic bags, but I still wanted a leaf topper even if you could sit on it. Enter my trusty friend Goodwill and the half-off color tag with several sets of green cloth napkins, some as cheap as four for fifty cents! I sewed two together and stuffed it with one layer of the recycled denim batting, making a chair cushion to go on top the pumpkin. After tacking the corners down, I now have a fun “green” piece of extra fall seating for pennies compared to the cost of a generic designer poof.

Then again, I also had an old sixty inch round orange table cloth that looked like it could be an even BIGGER pumpkin ottoman and plenty more recycled denim to fill it. Since this was already round, I didn’t have to sew the bottom closed but gathered the edge as much as possible before giving it a good old stuffing. Had this been a stiffer fabric, a drawstring closure might have been better, and it is also possible to build a square frame inside for a properly firm piece of furniture. This basic gather and stuff method, however, anyone can do, no matter how tiny or huge the pumpkin!

This giant pumpkin poof, though, did take a lot of stuffing, and one might pay hundreds to buy this much polyfill and foam. All the plastic bags I had gone to the outer layer with the gathers creating the pumpkin seam-like squat around a center recycled denim core. Because this pumpkin was shorter and wider than my firm pumpkin poof, I sewed eight green napkins together for two oblong padded leaves on top. After tacking the corners down, I found end pieces from a beige table runner in my fabric stash and sewed them into a stem shaped throw pillow as a piece de resistance.

It would cost a hundred dollars or more to make something like these with store-bought materials and much more to buy ottomans in this size – not that you can get a pumpkin-shaped ottoman in stores! Not everyone may have the recyclable materials to do this, but I hope this gives you an idea on how to make good Halloween use of plastic bags or excess packing supplies when you do have them. Though giant compared to the mini, instantly stuffed pumpkins, these are still kind of small for adults. For imaginative kids, however, these poofs are a Cinderella loving dream.

 

Revisit more Kbatz Krafts including:

How to Make Stuffed Pumpkins

Spooky Spellbooks

Tea Stained Labels and Spooky Bottles

Creepy Cloches

It’s a Pumpkin Cat House