Halloween Crafts: Pumpkin Sun Catcher

Decorate your windows this Halloween with this delightful pumpkin sun catcher. They are easy to make and lots of fun.

To make your pumpkin sun catcher you will need two identical paper plates. They need to be the regular flat-bottomed kind; not the kind that have sections divided into them. You will also need a bit of colored tissue paper.

Using a pencil, lightly sketch a design of what parts of your pumpkin you want to cut out onto one of the paper plates. Consider that the circle of the plate is going to be your pumpkins face, but avoid making any cuts into the last inch all around the edge of your plate.

Once you have your design sketched out, put your plates on top of a surface that won't be damaged by cutting onto it, such as a piece of scrap wood or a cutting board from the kitchen. Using a craft knife, cut straight down through both plates and remove each of the cutout areas that you sketched out. Make sure your pumpkin has a mouth, a nose, and eyes cut out as well as any extra details you want to add. For example, you might like your pumpkin to have ears or eyebrows.

Set one of the plates aside, and add a thin layer of glue to the uncut sections of the other one. You will be putting the glue on the side of the plate that you would normally eat from. Spread glue around the plate's edge, and then onto any thick uncut areas; for instance, around your pumpkin's cheek bones. Be careful not to slop glue into the cut out areas. You don't want it to drip over the cut edges.

Take a circle of tissue paper slightly smaller than the size of your plate and lay it very carefully into your wet glue. Smooth it so that each of the open areas has tissue paper stretched tightly across them with no wrinkles showing. You can use yellow tissue paper to look like sunlight, or black tissue paper if you want the inside of your pumpkin to look like it's in shadow.

Add another thin layer of glue on top of the tissue paper in the same areas you did before. Take your second plate and lay it down so that it nests directly on top of the tissue paper with the cutouts from the first plate in line with the cutouts on the second plate. Press it down and smooth it, and then allow it to dry completely before you try to move it.

Once your pumpkin sun catcher is dry, punch a hole in the top edge of it and tie a length of yarn to it so that you can hang it in your window sill.

This delightful pumpkin sun catcher makes a fun daytime decoration, but at night there will be no sunlight to show through it. After dark you may wish to move it inside and place it in front of a lamp so that it can continue to glow.

Happy Halloween!

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