At the end of the 2022 season I stopped by a craft store the day after Halloween and they were having a massive sale on foam pumpkins trying to get rid of inventory. I happily waked away with a cart full for around $100. By June of 2023 I was kind of tired of seeing the pile of shopping bags just collecting dust. So I decided that one night a week I would spend an hour or so carving a pumpkin. Nothing super fancy, just silly simple faces. At the time I had NO CLUE what we were going to do with them, but at least they would be carved.
I browsed around on google and found a nice collection of “fun pumpkin faces” in a file and used it as a basis for all the faces. I hand sketched each face on the pumpkin each week and then carved the face using an x-acto knife. Carving progressed all summer, David helped a few nights. It was honestly a really nice calm activity for decompressing one night a week. We still had no idea what to do with them though. By the end of July I had decided I would embed addressable LEDs in them to let us make them flicker and possibly control them using the computer or something.
Once I had them all carved I decided they looked too shiny, so I re-painted them all using acrylic paint mixed with baking soda to give them a more natural texture. I also added some lowlights and a few blemishes here and there to really give them some character. I then sprayed the all with multiple coats of a semi-gloss clear coat to make sure all that hard work with the texturing didn’t get ruined by the elements. After that all dried for a few days, I set about adding in the LED light strips. Each pumpkin contains six addressable LEDs which provides a lot of flexibility when they are lit. At this point I figured we would just line them up along the sidewalk or in front of the tree in the yard as a basic pumpkin patch so at least they would be used.
One day shortly after the big box stores had put out their Halloween merchandise and we were browsing an isle full of 3ft skellies, David had an idea. “What if we had a bunch of the little skeletons running around with the pumpkins in all sorts of poses” We both thought that was absolutely perfect so we bought a small army of mini skeletons. We piled them all in the back of the Jeep and drove home. ( Technically they weren’t piled, I creatively posed a bunch of them so they were being mischievous and a general traffic hazard for onlookers 🙂 )
Once we got the skeletons home David and I set about posing them in silly poses, and attaching pumpkins to them. I can’t tell you how many times we snorted or outright laughed at some of the poses we tried. Eventually we managed to get all ten posed in the front yard with their pumpkins.
In the end they ended up being one of our favorite additions to the display. They add a sense of whimsey, and now that they are tied into the computer, they change colors and flicker on cue with everything else going on with the house.
Look out West Chicago, the “Pixelkins” are up to no good.
“What’s with the name”, you may ask? It’s a portmanteau of Pixel and Pumpkin. Each of the six LEDs in the pumpkins are referred to as a Pixel. so they are Pixel Pumpkins. This also fit really well with the addition of the skeletons. They are one big happy family of mischievous skeletons, so they are all “Kin”.
Happy Haunt-o-weening
John