Many years ago, as I was first learning about how to work with circular knitting machines, I used a small scrap of Red Heart Ombre yarn in the True Blue colorway to make a quick, single-layer pumpkin.
After finishing it, I decided later that circular-knitted pumpkins definitely look better when they're made double-layered. But I had this single-layer blue pumpkin sitting there wondering how it might fit into my seasonal decorating for one of my favorite holidays: Halloween.
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| Inspo photo from Disney's Emoji Blitz game |
My poor blue pumpkin actually sat for a long, long time (more than five years!) waiting for its chance to become something more. I didn't want to just rip it apart and start over, using the materials for something else.
I would pull it out of a yarn bin every so often and ponder it. I'm not sure exactly when it finally occurred to me that the light blue yarn kind of resembled the skin tone of Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. But once I got that idea in my head, I was determined to transform my blue pumpkin into a Sally character pumpkin.
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| Another inspo photo found online |
Sally's most distinctive features are her blue skin, her cherry-red hair, her big white eyes with little black pupils, and, of course, the black stitches all over her skin. (Her colorful patchwork dress is also distinctive, but for this project, I was going to focus just on Sally's face.)
For the eyes, I followed this tutorial by Harriet's Crochet on YouTube. I made the eyes with fingering weight cotton yarn in black and white and a 2.25 mm crochet hook. I used white instead of the iris color shown in the tutorial, and also added an extra round of white to get them to the finished size I wanted.
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| Top view after adding hair and eyes |
For the hair, using the cherry-red yarn and a 5 mm hook, I crocheted a foundation SC chain until it was long enough to reach vertically from pole to pole on the pumpkin, which ended up being 28 stitches long. The remaining rows are worked in YOslst in the back loop to give a texture that resembles her strands of hair. The finished rectangle is about 14 inches long and covers about 2/3 of the pumpkin (leaving the other 1/3 of the pumpkin open for her face). I gathered the top and bottom edges and wrapped them around the pumpkin and tied everything together to secure.
Then I crocheted a vine-like stem similar to the one I added to my crocheted Little Rustic Pumpkin back in 2019. To make the vine, I crocheted 6 SC in a magic circle, then kept crocheting the 6 stitches in a continuous spiral until the length was long enough to cover a 12-inch pipe cleaner. (I actually twisted together two pipe cleaners.) After inserting the pipe cleaners, I started increasing each round of SC until the circle had 42 stitches (to provide a secure base for the vine, and to cover the "bald spot" at the top of Sally's head where I wasn't able to cinch the top of her red hair any tighter).
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| Bottom view |
Sewing on her eyes was probably the scariest step for me, because I didn't want to have them end up looking wonky. But I just worked slowly and carefully, and they ended up looking pretty good. 😊 I intentionally did NOT stitch her eyes down tightly where they cross the creases between the pumpkin segments.
Using the fingering-weight black yarn, I embroidered a kind of stem stitch to line the top edge of her eyes and then continued sewing her eyelashes in little V's back across the line across the top of her eyes.
Then, in black, I embroidered Sally's distinctive slash that crosses her face near her right eye. And then I embroidered the stitches that extend across her cheeks on either side of her lips.
The final touch was to embroider her lips using a sort of satin puff stitch using a bit of the same yarn as her hair. You can find more info about the yarns I used on my Ravelry project page.
I think my Sally Stitches Pumpkin turned out great, and she looks so happy sitting there on my hearth beside her "Jack Skellington."
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| Feet up to relax after a job well done |
I love Sally's character, and I have even dressed up as her for my friend's Halloween party!
