This was the nearest we've come to a commission for a scarecrow. The school PTA were looking for props for the schools Halloween party. Somehow I agreed to do a scary scarecrow. Given we have a scarecrow frame permanently up in various states of dress near the shed it seemed a natural thing to do...
From the start I wanted a pumpkin head with a flickering flame. Health and safety dictated we couldn't have a real flame so I spent about 4 times along trying to make a mechanical one as I did on the rest of the scarecrow.
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| Testing the flame. |
The flame was built by taking one of the fans from a toy RC hovercraft and mounting a group of super bright red LEDs on top. Finally (and this took the most fiddling) attaching some reflective strips of fabric that wave about over the fan when switched on and reflect the red light. I started with some red clear cellophane which wasn't very effective. In the end some silver reflective fabric performed best. It looks a bit lame in the video, but trust me, it was quite effective whirring away inside the pumpkin.
The final challenge was mounting the "flame" in the pumpkin and the pumpkin on the scarecrow frame. Pumpkins are quite heavy so there was a lot of rope (painted orange) holding it all in place. On the night, it stayed up and the whirring of the fan added quite a nice moaning effect to the whole thing. Plus we had some spare pumpkins left over for carving.
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| Pumpkin Head at the school. |
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| A properly lit pumpkin I carved. |
