Light up those pumpkins! (tutorial)

It may have taken me the best part of a month to post, but here's how I made the little illuminated pumpkins for my Halloween setup.

At first I just made them out of solid fimo, but then, whilst looking to see if anyone else had a better idea for making them hollow, I stumbled upon this excellent tutorial.
She advocated using polystyrene balls in the centre, as the material shrinks under extreme heat. I didn't have any the same type, but I did have some scraps of polystyrene packing material which I was able to tear up into little clumps. It's a fantastic technique and one I will certainly use again!

I used dried grape stems for the stalks, and made a variety of pumpkins of all shapes and sizes as I tried to work out how best to light them.

 I'm a big fan of £1 shops, especially this time of year as you get a lot of useful LED products to choose from with all manner of seasonal items coming out during the runup to Christmas. Most are too big and/or poorly made to use, but if you've got your eye in you can find a lot to salvage.
 I bought a set of battery powered LED pumpkin lights, and found to my delight that the hollow plastic pumpkins simply popped off the bulbs/ (I used a cut down one for David's head in the final photo, ahaha!)

As the fimo pumpkins were so thin, I carved a small hole at the back of them and fed the bulb through...et voila!

I taped the lights to the table and used a combination of blu-tack and, at one point, superglue, to keep them down as they kept pinging back up. XD

Once they were all in the right place I added the pumpkins, made sure they were secure and covered the exposed wiring with foliage.

I made a new batch of autumn leaves too, using some freshly fallen leaves from a cherry tree down the road and a variety of paper punches. I punch them out when they're fresh, then leave them to dry as if you try it when the leaves have already hardened they become incredibly fragile.

So there you go! :D