Lighting The Pumpkin With LEDs
Lesson 8 from: Creative Pumpkin Carving Ideas, Patterns, and ToolsJason Hoppe
Lighting The Pumpkin With LEDs
Lesson 8 from: Creative Pumpkin Carving Ideas, Patterns, and ToolsJason Hoppe
Lesson Info
8. Lighting The Pumpkin With LEDs
Lessons
Lesson Info
Lighting The Pumpkin With LEDs
So now we're gonna show you how you can light your pumpkin. We've had so much fun creating these pumpkins, of course you've gotta light them and that can create a really cool and dramatic effect. One of the great things is now with the advent of LED lights, it makes your lighting options just incredible. Before, you'd put a candle in there or sometimes you'd run Christmas lights and I kind of like the idea of Christmas lights. They now have the LED lights that are like the individual bulbs, like the old, old Christmas lights and that's great if you ever wanna put them in the back of a pumpkin. I like to do a whole series of pumpkins, kinda smaller ones, and it's a great way to light them. Just go ahead and cut little holes in the back and just put the bulbs in. But some of the other ones that we have, and we got these on Amazon, these are really simple. This one's cool because it's a three mode light. It's an LED so it's just got the little strobe that you have, plus it also has a litt...
le flicker to it as well. And then you have the multicolored ones. Now you can go crazy, you can get the ones that you can adjust with your phone, which would be pretty cool so you can go ahead and make all these other cool strobe lights. But we have a couple other options, too. This is just a little string of LEDs powered by a little button battery. And simple, and these are really long lasting, too. You can get these in battery powered or you can also get them in solar powered, too. I just bought a set of these in solar and you can just run them through and they're just these little teeny LED diodes here. Simple on, off switch and just drop it right in and they work. We also have these little finger lights, which are cool, which are just these little LEDs. And they're just little ones that you can turn on and turn off here. Red, white, we got blue ones, too. I'm sure they come in a lot of different colors. But if you wanted to create a little bit of fun with those, too, simple little battery, and last a nice, long time. You can always use candles. Candles are fine, that's why we cut out the bottom so you can put it right over the candle. And if it's gonna be something that you're going to have people around, one nice thing is if you go ahead and put a candle in there and then you put the lid back on or in this case where we didn't cut off the top here, put cinnamon inside there and as it heats it up it kind of smells like nice pumpkin pie. But doesn't work with LED lights, you gotta have the heat to do it. So a lot of different options. What we're gonna do is we're going to show you how these look with them lit. So we'll summon up the evening and it will happen and it will soon get dark and then we can put the lights in. So, we're gonna start off here with this little one that does the flickering lights and the one with the strobe as well. This is my favorite with the little flickering light right there. So, once darkness falls then we can go ahead and show you what this looks like. So we're gonna start off with the little flickering light and I'm just going to put that right under there. Makes it very nice. See how nice it is to go ahead and put that in there at the bottom and set it up? And you've got the little flickering light in there, looks like a great little candle, works really good. Strobe's a little bit annoying but you can get ones that just give off a nice diffused light. Now, sometimes you're gonna have an issue where the light, you're gonna actually see the light and it's gonna be kind of bright inside the pumpkin. So, if I were to use something like this where I can use these little LED lights, these little string, and put them in, you may see the lights coming up all inside there. And you can go ahead and we got some just diffusion paper here or you can buy some cellophane or some stuff that's gonna have a little bit of a frosted tint to it as well and you can always go in and you can put that inside your pumpkin to kind of cut down the amount of glare. So you can put that in the back or put them over the lights and then when you put the lights in, so if I were to put them behind here, and if you get a flickering light it's gonna go ahead and create a little bit more diffused glow behind there. And you can just attach this paper on the inside if you want to as well. And don't be afraid to use like nails or things like that on the inside of the pumpkin just to kind of push it in or even for decorations, you know? You could have a lot of fun with like nails or screws for hair or crazy things like that. But a little bit of diffusion goes a long way and also if you only have white LED lights, you can buy some of that colored plastic, too that goes in there to create different colors. But this works really nice. You just bunch them up in there and it works really good. Now one of the things when we got these little finger lights, I saw these things and I thought, "Okay, this is really cool." And I just thought of this but these little rotating eyeballs here, could you imagine if we go in and we were to put these little finger lights right in back of our little rotating eyeballs since we have a hole in the middle of our eye right there? If we were to do that, I have to flip this over and do it. I think this would be like totally cool. Look at that. Oh, my gosh. Look it, glow in the dark eyeballs. And that all was because when I used my drill to cut the holes in there, it had that little hole and then I saw that and I thought, "Okay, this is just way too cool." So now it doesn't light up the pumpkin at all 'cause I already have a hole in there. Turn that little switch on, look at that. Freaky, crazy, and eyeballs going different directions, and you can rotate that. I mean, how awesome is that? Especially when they fall out. Oh well, you know, you lose an eye, you got two. So these are just little finger lights, little on, off switch right there. You can put them in your pumpkin and you can just have them all around. This one is the surface carving and it took a little bit of time 'cause I was actually going through and had to scrape out the surface behind. But what's nice with this is that you can put any of these lights in here and you can see that it just lights up the background very nicely. Now, with these LEDs you can see that they create a little bit of hot spots right there but if you put a couple sets of these in here and turn them on, you can definitely make that work and apply a lot and of course, put the lid right back on. And at night, you can see that shines through really well. And it's not difficult to scrape the inside of this. As you start to scrape the inside, one of the things that when I use my little scraper here, when you scrape it, if you scrape it with the lights inside you'll be able to see how close you're getting to the surface and also too, you can kind of feel how thin the surface is when you put your hand on here when you scrape. Use any type of light that you want to in here. Those work really good. But the little flickering pumpkin is pretty awesome. If you were to do something like this where you've got that little flickering glow of it as well and that makes it pretty awesome. Put that in there. You got that lit up there. And the one eyed monster. So, lots of great things. If you wanna use the bigger Christmas lights, simple stuff, just go right through the back here. Take your hole saw and just cut a hole right in the back and that way you can string all these pumpkins along and just have them all connected, too. If you have Christmas lights, you know, white Christmas lights, those work, too. You can put in a set, those are gonna be really bright. Well, I love this with that. And I just wanna show you what the diffusion kind of looks like. You can see that it's a little bit of a hot spot since it's a single LED right in there. But I'm gonna put some of the diffusion paper in here to kind of cut that down. See if that makes a bit of a difference right there. And it kind of diffuses it a little bit more. A lot of cool things that you can do with lighting but these little finger LEDs and these LED battery powered switchable ones work great as well. And then you got the little single ones here. Little flash, a little color change here if you wanna do something like that. And then of course you have your strobe which just goes through and does that. So, simple things, go ahead and light your candles. Here they are. And you can get these all on Amazon and I think these were like really inexpensive for multiple sets of these. But you got great options here to go ahead and light your pumpkins. Turn this back on here. There we go. Light it up. So we got our surface carving, we have our crazy Zelda right here. You're all set, you're ready to go. They're all lit and happy. And that, folks, is how you can have some fun carving pumpkins.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Free Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Fran
Glad that I saw this, now! I love pumpkins!! Looking forward to the season You show a lot of great, and super creative techniques that I can't wait to try. Thank-you!
Claudia Ortega-Lukas
This video had some really good and cool ideas/techniques, however, you should do a zoom into the tools when you show them. I'd like to see close up the shape of each tool you demonstrated. Otherwise, it was fun!
Rhonda Chapin
I learned some great hacks and tricks. Going to carve my pumpkin this year with more enthusiasm! BTW something I thought might be helpful is to push pins to hold stencil designs on pumpkin since tape doesn't work.
Student Work
Related Classes
Holiday & Party Crafts