Pumpkins in March?!

My five year old has been taking ballet since September of 2007 and her spring ballet recital coming up--she will be a pumpkin in the Cinderella performance. I'm trying very hard not to think about how much money I'm paying for her minimal amount of stage time...but let's just say it is cringe-worthy! The cost of lessons, performance fees, costume fees, and ticket fees (yes, we must buy EXPENSIVE tickets in addition to all the fees!) really adds up. As in hundreds of dollars. Ouch. They're doing three performances and she's on stage for about three minutes in each performance. Yup. Not exactly a fiscally sound move on my part, but she is very very excited about this. *sigh*

I'm excited that she is a pumpkin (her whole class is) because she's been my pumpkin since before she was born--I painted my pregnant tummy to look like a pumpkin back in October of 2003! She even dressed up as a pumpkin for her first Halloween. The costumes the studio chose aren't exactly my style (shiny orange leos?) but they do the trick. I think tutu dresses (that I could have made for waaaaay less than the costume fee) would have been cuter, but whatever.

The problem is that these leotards and matching headpieces are supposed to be for flower costumes, not pumpkins. So I was volunteered (not quite sure how that happened!) to turn the flower headpieces into pumpkin headpieces.

The headpiece on the left is how they all came to me--not nearly as cute and fluffy as in the picture on the costume company website! I started by cutting off the fluffy bits in the middle of the flower (as you can see in the headpiece on the right.)
Then I korked some green grosgrain ribbon to make the pumpkin vines. To kork ribbon you just wrap the ribbon around wood dowels (use clothes pins to hold it in place) and bake it on a clean cookie sheet. I spray the ribbon-wrapped dowel with water, too, before baking it at 205 for about 20 minutes.
After baking it, you can spray it with starch to help it keep the tight kork (especially if you're making bows with it), but I didn't need to do that. I just took the ribbon off the dowels and cut it into shorter bits. (And yes, I korked more ribbon that what I'm showing here!)
See, nice and curly! This is like the ribbon that stores like Gymboree use to make their hair curlies. You can buy korked ribbon on etsy and other sites, but it is SO simple to kork it yourself.

Anyhow, then I made stems out of felt and stuffed them...then I hotglued everything onto the headpieces. I fixed the "vines" down in a few spots so that hopefully the little girls won't pull them straight.
I think they look very pumpkin-y and the director loves them!
Princess is very excited that her mama made all the pumpkin heads--she's easily pleased!