Winners of the Ector County Library’s Literary Pumpkins contest will be announced in a Facebook live broadcast Friday.
It should be up before lunchtime.
Children’s Librarian Jamie Henry said the library got about 20 pumpkins depicting characters from children’s books of all kinds.
The winners do receive prizes. The person who wins first prize gets two tickets to Fiddlesticks Farms that they donated to the library. There will be gift cards and other prizes as well.
Henry said the Midland County Library also did literary pumpkins.
“Many libraries and schools across the country have done it,” Henry added, so she decided to try it in Odessa and see what they got.
She’d like to do it again next year.
Henry said she was impressed with the entries.
“They came up with some really great things,” she said.
They took entries for three weeks and staff voted on them by number.
Those who turned pumpkins in don’t need to be present to win.
Henry didn’t want to give away who she voted for.
“I think those that did all the ones from the Plants vs Zombies, which is another graphic novel series. There’s two of them right down here were very inventive. Because they’ve got the Fire Peashooter and The Chomper and then we have Boomerang and Winter Shooter on the other side. You can see they’re in their pots. They got really inventive with them. It was very hard voting because so many were so good,” Henry said.
Students from Ector County ISD’s Transition Learning Center dropped off some pumpkins, although the deadline had passed.
Transition Facilitator Laura Morris said she thinks the students really enjoyed the project.
“Some of them wanted to keep painting,” Morris said.
The students were given keywords so they could look the characters up online to see how they wanted to paint their pumpkins.
“It was a good project for them. Some of them don’t like the feel of paint, so it was good to get them out of their comfort zone,” Morris said.
She added that they try to get the students involved in the community more, so they read the newspaper every day and they find projects that they want to do or places they want to go.
The students have started doing Empty Bowls.
“Then in January, we’ll be part of the fundraiser,” Morris said.
