Another Project: Pumpkin Cowboy

 You might have noticed by now that I make stuff occasionally. Usually I make stuff for my kids. I have made stuff to sell. This time around it was a gift for daughter Emma. 

  Emma likes a song/video about a pumpkin cowboy, conveniently called, "Pumpkin Cowboy". It's a quirky thing, with a strange star: a cowboy made from one of those ceramic shelf sitter pumpkins with a face, and pipe cleaner arms and legs. You can watch the video HERE. (Warning, it will get stuck in your head.) 

  Apparently the star of the song was auctioned off for charity, and Emma said she wished she had gotten him. Well, she didn't. And this isn't the real thing. But I can try to get close. He'll still be fun to have sitting around her house. 

  Let me say, I started this project last year. It just took a while. I started by trying to find the right shelf sitter pumpkin. They were originally sold unfinished and ready for painting and assembling. Then I suppose they were sold by the 'crafters' who made them. I think they're from the 90's. They're for sale online, and come with various expressions. Somehow I bought the wrong pumpkin...twice. When I did find the right one he was always being sold in lots of three or four pumpkins, and so was more expensive. I didn't want to pay that much, especially after buying the wrong one twice already. The right one was hardest to find, and only once in a while sold by himself. And when he did show up alone, he was always more expensive than any of the other guys. The search continued.  

  Before finding the right pumpkin I had also been searching for the other things I'd need. The first two wrong pumpkins had pipe cleaner arms and legs, with ceramic hands and feet attached. So I was able to steal the hands from one of them. The feet on both, however, were tennis shoes, and I needed cowboy boots. I couldn't find ceramic cowboy boots anywhere. I started looking at other possibilities. Ken and I were in a toy shop one day last year, when I found a Barbie accessory pack that contained a pair of cowboy boots. Other than having a different design on the sides, they were perfect: the right size, the right height, the right heels. They were metallic gold though! 

I thought it would be no problem, because there are paints that work on plastic. Well...we'll get to that.

  I had some pipe cleaners the right colour, from a kit to make pipe cleaner reindeer. (I was just going to steal the parts to make other stuff anyway. I only paid $1 for the kit at a bin store.) I had a red bandana to cut his bandana from. I got that at a bin store too. But I still needed a cowboy hat. As you might note, in the picture Pumpkin Cowboy has something of a ten gallon hat. I was having trouble finding any cowboy hats at all, let alone ten gallon ones. So when Ken popped up at a bin store with a box of tiny cowboy hats, I was flabbergasted that, after showing them to me, he said, "But we aren't going to buy them." "Oh yes we are! That's just what I need to complete Pumpkin Cowboy! And why would I not buy a bunch of tiny cowboy hats?!" They weren't ten gallon hats, but they were cowboy hats, and beggars can't be choosers. Of course, when I said it was what I needed to complete PC, I meant other than the pumpkin himself. That was the last thing I still had to get.

  I finally found someone who would sell me the one I wanted out of a lot, for a fair price. He was the right pumpkin, but there were slight differences. 

The one I bought.

The real Pumpkin Cowboy.
"Life is tough for a gourd out on the range."

  One eye was perfect, but the other eye wasn't looking quite the right direction, and the shine dot was in the wrong place. So to make it right I had to repaint both eyes so they would match. His eyelashes weren't quite right either, so I had to remove them and paint new ones. To do that, I had to scrape them off, since the whole thing had been painted and fired in a kiln. And of course, scraping off the eyelashes meant scraping off the orange paint underneath in the process. So I had to repaint that. But I couldn't just repaint that. It showed, no matter how well I matched the colour. So I had to mix up the appropriate orange paint colour and repaint the whole thing. Then I had to paint the new eyelashes. I also had to add the darker colour back into the pumpkin creases, (What do you call those?), and his mouth. Then I had to seal the whole thing with something so it wouldn't scrape off.  I used Mod Podge, which was maybe a little too shiny.

  The next problem was, I had to paint the brown hat and gold boots. I also gave the white ceramic hands a coat of paint. The hands were the easy part. The hat wasn't too bad either. I had to spray it and hand paint the hat band with acrylic paint. But those boots were a pain in the butt. The paint was supposed to work on plastic, but I guess slightly soft vinyl was a different matter. The paint just wouldn't dry! I left the boots for two days, and they were still sticky. I figured maybe I had just sprayed too many coats of paint too close together. Finally I gave in. I decided the only thing to do would be to scrape off the paint and paint them again. I debated on just using acrylic paint. In the end I scraped them bare and sprayed them lightly again with the plastic safe paint. They seemed a little less sticky than the first time, but they were taking too long to lose their stickiness. I had Emma's birthday the next day. What was I going to do? 

  Well, in the meantime, I had another problem to solve. The wrong pumpkins I bought had at least had  holes for the pipe cleaner arms and legs. The right guy had just come as a sitting head, with no holes for arms and legs even if he had wanted some. I thought I was going to drill holes in him for the arms and legs. I was afraid he would break though. I consulted our family ceramics expert, Ivy, and she confirmed what I thought: I'd have to drill with water on him, and maybe submerge him. Uh...I don't think I want to try it. In the end I decided I could just glue his legs in the hole in the very bottom of him, and glue his arms underneath the neckerchief. So here he is, waiting for his hat, hands and feet.

His neckerchief still needed trimmed too. "With a smile wide and a kerchief tied around his neck/waist..."

 I even remembered that he needed his lasso, and I had the right twine in my art stuff. 

  The morning of Emma's birthday his boots were still sticky. I painted the bottoms with acrylic paint anyway, and hoped he'd dry quickly. Finally I made an executive decision and sprayed him with matte fixative anyway. I thought maybe it would seal the sticky in. A couple of coats later, and I was proven right. So his boots were glued on, and he was boxed up for gift giving.

  Luckily, Emma liked him. He now lives on the window sill in her entryway.

The type of hands he has are actually reversed from the real one. That one has the open hand on the other side, and he holds the tail of his lariat in the  more fisted hand, like mine has on the left here.

When he's held the right way, he can even spin his lariat.

Their cat Arthur is in the background, top right.

  So that's the tale of Pumpkin Cowboy. I have several projects to work on now. Christmas isn't that far away!