The holiday season is upon us and that means lots of fun holiday gatherings. Dress up your Thanksgiving table with this DIY Floral Pumpkin Centerpiece. The good news, you can actually make the centerpiece now and enjoy it all month. The secret, there is no carving involved. While it looks like I carved into the pumpkin to make it a vase, I actually hot glued dried flowers to the top. This way, nothing will rot or die. And I get to enjoy a pretty centerpiece all November.
Often when you see floral pumpkins, people have carved the pumpkin and put a vase or floral foam inside. However, as soon as you carve a pumpkin it begins to rot and will only last about 4 days. Therefore, instead of carving into the pumpkin, as mentioned above, I decided to hot glue dried flowers to the top to create a vase look without actually making a vase. Granted, you can’t use fresh flowers, but you could substitute dried flowers for faux flowers.
I picked dried flowers because dried hydrangeas are readily available in the fall. The darker colored hydrangeas all dry beautifully and reflect the natural beauty fall provides. I often buy them fresh and then the flowers dry out naturally in the vase. I’ve been enjoying these hydrangeas since early September. Now let’s get to the how-to for this simple DIY floral centerpiece.
Materials
- Medium/Large Pumpkin
- Dried Hydrangea (about 6 small blooms)
- Dried Chinese Millet in Mango/Yellow (about 8 stems)
- Fresh greenery (about four branches; gather clippings from your yard or ask your local florist for lemon tip leaves, eucalyptus or another variety you like)
- Hot glue and hot glue gun
Instructions
Step 1: Cut the hydrangea stems short and hot glue them to the top of the vase. Move around the pumpkin to create a dome look. For the last stem placed in the center, don’t worry about gluing it as it should stay in place surrounded by the other hydrangeas.
Step 2: Next insert the millet around the base of the hydrangea. I did not hot glue these on, but you could if they are not holding.
Step 3: Lastly, add a few branches of greenery at the base of the hydrangea. You may have to hot glue them if they are not staying in place. I only had to hot glue a couple of the stems. Otherwise, everything stayed in place.
And that’s it! Easy, right? The greenery will probably dry out and need to be replaced before thanksgiving but that was free from the yard or costs very little if you buy it.
I’m using my floral pumpkin on my coffee table and surrounded it with a variety of pumpkins and guards I already had from Halloween. In fact, I also had the large gray pumpkin from Halloween. It was the base pumpkin for my DIY Haunted House Pumpkin. I love how I was able to repurpose it for Thanksgiving.
