Boho Pumpkins with braided raffia

These Boho pumpkins with braided raffia are a fun and easy fall craft. The neutral color and texture of the DIY raffia pumpkins lend themselves perfectly to your Boho decor!

It’s officially fall! Can you feel it where you are? Is the weather starting to turn cooler yet? I am excited to share my first fall craft for this year, these Boho pumpkins with braided raffia. I kind of have a Boho theme going on with my mantel this year so I will be sharing several crafts that revolve around that.

What is Boho style?

If you are wondering what the heck Boho means, you are probably not alone! Boho (or Bohemian) style is a trend that has become popular in decorating over the last several years. If you think of Boho fashion, it will remind you of a more hippy style from the 60’s and 70’s, pulling inspiration from natural fabrics and materials, flowy dresses, flowery prints and crocheted items. Well it is not so different in decor.

Just like with fashion, a lot of the items we see in Boho decor were abound in 1970’s homes. Macramé planters and wicker furniture are back baby! 🙂 Macramé, natural products, fringe and crocheted items are a signature staples in Boho style. There are also a lot more colors going with Bohemian style which I LOVE! The natural raffia look of these pumpkins make them fit into the Boho style perfectly!

This post is actually a year in the making as I made these braided pumpkins last year but did not get around to posting them. You may remember my DIY raffia Christmas trees from last year, these raffia pumpkins were actually what inspired the trees! Ha!

Supplies for making Boho pumpkins with braided raffia

*There are links to products in this post that I use or are similar to products I use. If you buy something from one of these links, I may make a small commission (with no additional cost to you) from the purchase. I will not recommend anything that I would not buy myself.

• Hot glue gun and glue sticks
• Scissors
• Yardstick/Tape measure
• Raffia
• Faux Pumpkins
• Real dried pumpkin stems

Braiding the raffia

The raffia comes in long pieces about 3-4 feet in length. I counted out 12 individual pieces to braid for the pumpkins. 

I used a clothespin to hold the ends of the raffia, you could also use a binder clip. In fact, that may actually work better, sometimes a piece would slip out of the clothespin when I was starting to braid it. Separate the strands into three groups of four.

Start braiding the raffia. As you braid, the ends of the raffia will also “braid” itself so you will have to pull out the ends of one of your groups of 4 occasionally to untangle the strands.

After I got a little bit braided, it was easier to hold the braid between my knees to add some tension to the braid. You could also tape it to the table but this worked well for me.

When I finished the braid, I just tied a short piece of raffia on each end to keep the braid from unraveling and removed the clothespin. I made several braid strands up ahead of time so I had them ready to glue onto the pumpkins.

Remove the faux stems

For these Boho pumpkins, I thought they would look much better with actual real dried pumpkin stems. I had saved some stems one year after the fall season, so I already had some around. If you don’t have any that you have saved, you can always buy them on Etsy.

Remove the faux stem, they come out pretty easily. You can just pull them out. You can see the faux stem in the picture below in front of a real stem. The real one looks much better, right?

Gluing braids onto your Boho pumpkins

Before attaching the braid to the pumpkin, I would add a bit of hot glue into the end of the braid strand to secure it. I cut off the ends of the strands right above where I glued.

Size your braid strand on the pumpkin to determine where you need to cut it off at.

Hot glue the braid strands onto the pumpkins along the ribs first. I tried not to overlap the raffia on top as I did not want a lot of bulk on top of the pumpkin. 

Continuing gluing braid strands onto the pumpkin following the shape of the pumpkin ridges. As you go along, you will cut the strands shorter each time just to fill in the open area. I did not overlap the raffia braids much if I could help it. One tip I figured out as I went along was to cut the braid strand into a point so it fits into a space much better. It also looks more appealing on the pumpkins rather than a straight cut as you can see towards the top of the pumpkin in the picture below.

This is the top (left) and bottom (right) of the pumpkin. I left a space for the stem on the top and tried to keep the bottom flat so it would sit level.

When you get done, you will have some excess hot glue on the ends of the braid strands like in the picture below. To remove that, just run your hot glue gun over the glue to heat it up again and rub it into the raffia. The glue chunks will essentially disappear!

Add real stems to your Boho pumpkins

Just hot glue your real dried stem to your raffia pumpkin in the space on the top. This finishes it off and adds so much to the look!

I also made the white baby boo pumpkin only gluing the braided raffia to the ribs of the pumpkin. I really like how this one turned out!

A quick and easy fall craft

These braided raffia Boho pumpkins were super simple to make and I think they are adorable! How about you? By the way, this ‘hello autumn’ sign is a DIY interchangeable farmhouse sign that we made a couple years ago. I love that I can change it out for the different seasons. Check out the tutorial to make one of your own!

I will be sharing these braided pumpkins on my Boho mantel soon but first I have a couple more fall crafts to share with you, including spotlighting this pumpkin in a glass cloche!! 

 

Have a great weekend!