Build fairy houses from pumpkins and put together a pumpkin fairy garden for Halloween display this year!

After I challenged my six-year-old son to build a house from a pumpkin and made one alongside him, we decided right away that we needed more.

I’ve always had a particular affinity for miniature worlds. If I had all the time in the world to make whatever crafts I want, I’d probably be building detailed doll houses. As it is right now, my creative partners (one is two, and another one is almost six) wouldn’t quite have the patience for that kind of work, so we occasionally make little doll houses. Like a doll house in a box. Or for this project, a house in a pumpkin.

It was a lot of fun to build it and imagine what kind of a small creature could live in it. Maybe, a mouse. Or maybe a gnome. Or a woodland fairy. We settled on fairies.

I guess, after the space-themed pumpkin display last year, we’ll have a fairy garden pumpkin display for Halloween this year!

Tools and Materials

Pumpkins. Lots of pumpkins! Small pie pumpkins will do for most of of the houses, but we got one big pumpkin for the two-storey pumpkin building.
A small pairing knife
A low-heat hot glue gun
A gouge for carving
Bamboo skewers
All kinds of nature finds for decorating the houses: dried moss, little rocks, pine cones, coloured corn, acorns, etc.

Tutorial

There are lots of different ways to go about building a pumpkin house. Check here to see a detailed tutorial on how my six-year-old built his pumpkin. His pumpkin house is the one with flowers on the right. It’s a very easy and required minimumal cutting and carving.

But what about the big two-storey house?

That pumpkin house was constructed from three pumpkins: two small pie pumpkins and one big pumpkin. All of them had their tops cut off, so that the insides could be hollowed. Then we used a gouge to carve a stone-like texture around the windows and the doors.

The biggest pumpkin acted as the first storey. The hole in it was made the right size for the pumpkin on top of it to nestle nicely. The front of the big pumpkin also had a hole, that acted as a door. The third pumpkin attached to it as a porch.

The pumpkins were connected together with short sections of bamboo skewers – you could also use round toothpicks. It wasn’t a rock-solid connection, but they could be carried around without falling apart. We used dry moss to cover the areas where they connected to make it look more or less seamless.

What about the roof? We shingled it with the scales of a big pine cone we found in the rain forests of Western Canada this summer. They were perfect for the job and their scent brought back pleasant vacation memories!

We used a hot glue gun to attach them around the roof in a circle.

We used the same scales for the chimney cap. The chimney itself is a rustic branch from our firewood stack. It’s attached with a couple of skewers that were first hot glued to the wood then poked into pumpkin after a last-second slathering of hot glue across the contact surfaces.

We also used skewers extensively for building frames in the windows. And in this little pumpkin we used coloured corn kernels for building decorations around the window frame.

Pumpkin Fairy Garden Display

Arranging the houses into a village was the best part!

There were still flowers growing in our yard, and there were certainly plenty of colourful leaves that had been deposited beneath the garden benches due to the wind. We used them for adding more decorations to the pumpkin houses.

We’ve also taken out some miniature objects – a couple of little dollhouse baskets, a wheelbarrow, a bucket, and a fence. The tutorial for how to make this quirky (very fairy-like!) ladder is also in our build-a-house-from-a-pumpkin challenge article.