Instructions

Before we start, some basic knowledge of using your craft cutter is needed, especially the modify panel for you Silhouette users. Also terms such as weeding and transferring are used in this tutorial.

1. In your craft cutter software, color code and lay out your cut files to the size needed for your pumpkin starting with the center flower. I measured the width of the area I wanted to cover on my pumpkin, and my lotus flower ended up being 6" wide. You'll notice I made the lotus flower very wide compared to the original file. This is to mimic the tobacco leaf vibe.
2. From there, layer your leaves behind your flower as shown below- I did mine flanking the lotus flower and slightly angled to left and to the right.
3. You can also merge/combine each cluster of leaves (which is what I did below) BUT you don't have to if you want a more layered look. I then erased the part of the leaf clusters that were behind the flower to make piecing the whole design easier once cut. Simple is best when dealing with ridged pumpkin.
4. Cut! You're going to end up cutting three times- pink vinyl for the flower and phoenix bird, green vinyl for the larger leaves and blue vinyl for the smaller leaves. You can fit multiples of each part on a page, so if you want to do double-sided pumpkins, make sure you duplicate your graphics.
5. Once you have your pieces cut, weed out the parts that are not part of the design using a weeding tool or tweezers. Then apply transfer paper over the vinyl design using a scraper or gift card to lift off the design and prep it for transferring/adhering to the pumpkin.
6. Transfer the center flower first- make sure you position it exactly where you want because it will be nearly impossible to reposition later.
7. Once the flower is in place, gently peel off the transfer paper, smooth out any bubbled areas, and repeat with the green and blue leaves.
8. Add some gold dots to the blue leaves and paint the pumpkin stem gold, too. Continue to smooth out any rough areas and use an x-acto knife to remove any unwanted vinyl overlap, if desired.

And that's it! Seems like a lot of work, but truly the most time consuming part is laying out your files to size in the craft cutting software. The rest is easy.