Delight your favorite Minecrafter with this real life Minecraft Pumpkin craft you can make at home! It’s pretty simple to make: you just need a square box, paint, construction paper and a sharp knife.

The hardest part of this craft is finding a truly square box! I searched around and discovered the perfect box at Michael’s in the gift box section, and it was under $3 bucks. Score!

It has a lid, which we also painted, but Mitch didn’t like the idea of a lid on a pumpkin, so we left it off. Michaels also had smaller boxes, but this one is about the size of our other indoor pumpkin collection–it’s 7.5 inches square.

Paint your Pumpkin Box

First I asked Mitch to paint the box. I gave him a sponge brush for the job, which speeds things up and makes it easy to cover the box in nice long strokes.

I directed him to paint side to side, with the box placed horizontal, so the inevitable brush strokes would look like vertical pumpkin stripes. (At least that was the idea.)

We used a cheap-o bottle of acrylic craft paint, which is water based and easy to clean up.

After the box was dry we played around with faces for the jack-o-lantern with squares of sticky notes. You could just make a basic creeper face yourself, but this step let’s younger crafters play around with ideas.

I cut the notes down to fit the pumpkin…and it took a couple tries to find the right face. We decided that the “vanilla Minecraft” pumpkin face was both too scary and too hard to copy. Mitch wanted to use Splody, his plush Creeper as a model for the jack-o-lantern.

I lobbied for a happy creeper face, since I prefer happy Jack-o-Lanterns, but Mitch stuck to his plan. We did simplified the Creeper face to make it easier to cut out.

Of course, you can give your pumpkin whatever sort of face you like. Just make sure you flip the box upside down before cutting the design out–you want the opening on the bottom!

I also used a ruler to straighten out the squares and make sure it was centered. Then I lightly traced the pattern in pencil and used a box cutter (and steel straight edge) to carve the holes. It’s not perfect because the gift box turned out to be made of really stiff cardboard. But it’s good enough.

We lined the inside of the box with black scrapbook paper, letting the paper curve around the inside and kept in place with double sticky tape. The curved paper will give a seamless inside to your pumpkin!

We topped it off with a green cube that I folded from a sheet of green scrapbook paper. If you’ve done any Minecraft paper crafting, you’ve probably made a ton of blocks like these. If you haven’t, check out my review of Pixel Papercraft! Pixel Papercraft has free downloads of just about any Minecraft block and mob.

Just copy a standard block and make from plain paper. (Of course, I cheated and used one already stored in my Silhouette paper cutter.) Our Minecraft jack-o-lantern looks pretty darn good. We can light him up with a battery powered pumpkin light–sadly it’s not safe for a real candle.