Life as a LEO Wife

Yep, you read that right! You can make the cutest little pumpkins from hair bun donuts. I know you have seen a bunch of different sock pumpkins, but these are made a little different from those. I’m sure most of us women have either made or used a hair bun donut. When I was trying to find a way to make small pumpkins to use as filler without having to have a pumpkin base, those sock donut buns popped into my head. Thus, these DIY yarn donut pumpkins were born!

If you’re looking for how to make yarn pumpkins with a styrofoam base pumpkin, you might enjoy this braided yarn pumpkin tutorial that I shared last year. There are video as well as photo tutorials.

Disclosure: I am a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and the Dollar Tree Affiliate Program, affiliate programs that allow me to link to the products that you can use to make this project quickly and easily. If you purchase any of these products I may receive a very small commission at no cost to you! That commission helps me continue to bring these great decor DIYs, free printables, and all of the other goodies on this site to you. Thanks so much for your support!

Supplies for Donut Pumpkins:

• old socks
• scissors- Fabric scissors are great for socks and yarn.
• yarn- I used white cozy chenille and a spun mustard yellow. Here’s a mustard chenille & twisted white.
• hot glue gun & glue
• tape
• stick or other item to use as a stem
• faux leaves
• twine or ribbon (optional)

Create a Donut Hair Bun

I used several different types of socks to create my yarn pumpkins. I used little boys baseball/football socks, low cut fuzzy slipper type socks (without grips), men’s long socks, and one man’s dress type sock. The process is the same with all of them.

Cut the toe section off of the sock.

Roll the sock up, giving about 2-3″ of width to work with.

Wrap the Donut with Yarn

One of the types of donut pumpkins I made was a simple wrap. All you need to do is unwind several yards of yarn. Add a bit of hot glue to the end and glue it inside the sock bun. Sorry, I had the pumpkin slightly outside of the tripod camera angle! However, you can tell that I was just squeezing a bit of glue in the rolled-up sock pumpkin.

Pass the yarn through the pumpkin, leaving one round of yarn on it.

Continue passing the bulk of the yarn around the outside of the sock and back through the middle until your donut is completely covered and you have a small pumpkin! It’s that easy.

Add a stem for your sock bun pumpkin. I used old sticks that my husband has saved for me. I removed the bark and popped them in the center of the donut.

For this pumpkin I used twine to add a little bow. For others I used fabric leaves and wood leaves.

Braided Yarn Donut Pumpkins

The next type of hair bun pumpkins that you can try is braided yarn pumpkins. Just like I did with the regularly wrapped ones, I used all three types of yarn to make these: thick chenille, twisted, and regular. I made the first with the white chenille.

Unravel several yards of yarn and cut it from the skein. Use that as a template and cut 2 to 8 more pieces. You can layer the pieces of yarn together to braid or use only 3 total pieces. I would say each of my pieces were at least 20-25′, which was enough for two pumpkins. With this first pumpkin, I tripled them up, using 9 total pieces. Tape your pieces to the table to hold them in place. There is a video of me braiding the yarn in the braided yarn pumpkins from last year.

Begin braiding the pieces together. You can move up the tape as you go if it gets too long for you.

If you need a video to see how I managed to braid very long lengths of yarn, check out this video.

Once it’s completely braided, you can either tape the ends together or tie them off with twine. I used both methods, on this one I tied them off.

Repeat the same steps as you did with the regularly wrapped pumpkin. Glue the yarn inside the donut, then wrap the braid around it until you have a completely covered pumpkin. I had quite a bit of the braided yarn left when this hair bun pumpkin was covered, so I tied the braid off with twine and used the braid on another pumpkin.

Finally, I placed a fabric leaf from Dollar Tree at the opening of the donut, and pushed a stem into it, holding them both in place.

Here’s a video of how to make braided yarn donut pumpkins from start to finish.

Hand Crocheted Yarn Pumpkins

You might’ve blanched a bit when reading “hand crocheted” pumpkin. Don’t worry. You don’t need to know how to crochet at all to do this! I’ve got a few videos as well as photos to walk you through this. This works a lot faster and easier if you have the thicker chunky yarn, but they didn’t have any colors that I liked available, so chenille it had to be. You can see how easy it is with chunk yarn in this wreath tutorial.

Tie a slip knot in the end of your yarn. To do that just made a loop first, then push another loop through it.

Continue pulling small loops, one at a time, through the hole. Each loop will create a new hole. That’s called chaining. With yarn this thin, having a crochet hook would work so much easier. Eventually I did switch to one on my second pumpkin, but I just wanted to show you it was possible.

Here’s a video to help.

When you think you have enough for your donut pumpkin, cut the yarn and pull one last loop through tightly. That will keep everything from unraveling.

Glue the yarn inside the sock bun and wrap it just like you did with the regular pumpkin.

Hand Crocheted Pumpkin Video

Here’s a video of the wrapping process. I also show you how to start a new piece of yarn if you didn’t make enough to cover the entire pumpkin, and how much easier it is to chain with a crochet hook. With this yarn pumpkin I used one of those fuzzy socks that people who don’t live in a tropical climate wear lol! It’s between ankle and crew length I guess, but it left quite a hole in the middle for some reason. You could keep layering the yarn, closing the hole, but I just chained another length of yarn and wound it in the center to hold the stem in. I fixed it after this video, but you’ll get the picture.

Layered Hand Crocheted Donut Pumpkin

You can make a crocheted pumpkin with multiple stands of yarn, like you did with the braided pumpkins. Just take two or three strands together and repeat the process of hand crocheting. I used mustard yellow twisted yarn for this. It’s much easier with a thicker chunk of yarn.

I thought I’d try a different way of putting this donut pumpkin together and save some yarn in the process by attaching the crocheted pieces on with glue. I cut the long string in pieces long enough to cover the outside of the sock bun, and not have to waste to much of the yarn on the inside. Glue each piece in the top, then inside the bottom. By the end they will hold themselves in place.

They look a little like braided pumpkins, sans one section of yarn. Pop in a leaf and stem and you have a cute little crocheted pumpkin!

Keep making your adorable donut pumpkins until you’re happy with the number or you run out of socks!

Now you know how to make four different versions of donut pumpkins (I counted single and multiple yarn crocheted pumpkins separately). When you combine different numbers of yarn in the braids and the crochets you can create a patch of unique pumpkins! I popped mine into a basket to display on our counter. Here’s how they look.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and get to make a ton of hair bun yarn pumpkins!

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