13 Disney Nights of Halloween – #12 Disney Pumpkins

One of our favorite Halloween traditions is making Jack-o-Lanterns.  Being the Disney nuts that we are, of course our pumpkins tend to represent Disney characters.   We’ll show you how we made this adorable Mickey Mouse Jack-o-Lantern with cute little pumpkin ears!

In the past, we’ve done simple pumpkins, like this Pooh pumpkin using a head, arms, and legs that you simply stick into the pumpkin…

… to traditional carved jack-o-lanterns like Mickey and Tinkerbell.

We’ve also seen some great Disney-inspired carvings at a local Jack-o-Lantern display

Where amongst thousands of Jack-o-Lanterns, we spotted:

Mickey

Mater

Ramone

Sally

Snow White

Lightning McQueen

and Lotso

Now if that hasn’t inspired you enough… check out this video of some of the Jack-o-Lanterns from Walt Disney World (2009)

We haven’t been fortunate enough to visit WDW when it’s populated with pumpkins, but hopefully we’ll get to do that one day.

Bella’s Mickey Pumpkin


This year, Bella had the idea to get three pumpkins, one for the head, and two tiny pumpkins for his ears.

We used the Mickey Mouse template from Spoonful.com  printed on 8×11 letter sized paper.

Because we were adding our own ears, I cut the ears off our template before taping it to the pumpkin

Then, using the little poker tool from a standard pumpkin carving kit, I poked holes outlining the black areas of our pattern.

I then used the little saw to cut out the pattern.

This is the hardest part.  I made a mistake right off the bat and began with the largest area, the top of his head.  This made it extremely difficult when I went to do the eyes.  So take my advice and cut out the small sections first.  If your lines are close together, don’t be afraid to leave a little more space between them.  the skinnier the space between two holes, the more likely it will be to break on you.  I ended up making Mickey’s nose a little smaller than the template to be sure it didn’t get too close to the eyes.

Now it was time for the ears.

First we removed the stems

Then I staked the pumpkins by pushing a green garden/floral stake all the way through each pumpkin.

I then broke off the excess, leaving these cute little pumpkin lollipops.

I marked the spot where we would push the ears in, and I let Bella do the honors.  It was her idea, after all.

I think it turned out pretty good.  The proportion of the pumpkins that Bella chose was perfect. While having a larger pumpkin for the body would have made the carving easier, having larger ears may have made that part harder.  So take those things into consideration when choosing what size pumpkins you want to use.

What’s your favorite Disney Jack-o-Lantern?  If you’ve got pictures, we love to see them!  Share them on our Facebook page!  We’ll be posting the rest of the ones we make all this week!

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