DomeStar vs Artmag Fake Pumpkins

Every September somebody at church asks me which fake pumpkins are worth the money, and every September I have given a wishy-washy answer. Not this year. The DomeStar pumpkin set has been in my house for two falls now, and I have picked over the Artmag assorted pumpkins on the shelf at the store enough times to know what they are. Both are decent. They are not the same product wearing different labels, and picking the wrong one is how a person ends up with a bag of pumpkins in the basement that never gets used.

Here is the short answer. The DomeStar set is a tabletop set. Eight small pumpkins and thirty faux maple leaves, thirty-eight pieces total, and the largest of them sits on about a five inch base. The whole set weighs a hundred and ninety-five grams, which is less than a paperback. The Artmag assorted pumpkins are porch pieces: bigger, heavier, and sold to fill a step or a planter where people see them from the driveway. If your pumpkins are going on the mantel, the entry table or the dining table, DomeStar is the one. If they are going on the front steps, the DomeStar set will look like you ran out of money halfway through.

	DomeStar 38 Piece Set	Artmag Assorted Pumpkins
What comes in the bundle	8 pumpkins plus 30 faux maple leaves	Pumpkins only, no leaves in the box
Largest pieces in the set	Small, roughly a 5 inch base at the widest	Several pieces sized for steps and porch corners
Where it belongs	Mantel, entry table, dining table, shelf	Front steps, planters, hay bales, porch floor
Finish and stems	Painted foam, even from piece to piece	More surface variation and fuller stems
Weight on an open porch	195 grams for the whole set, so wind moves them	Heavier pieces that hold their spot
Storage between seasons	One shallow basket on a shelf	A bin, and the stems are what get crushed
Sitting out in weather	Listed as waterproof, though mine stay under the roof	Built to sit out, though a season of sun dulls them
Pieces for the money	38 pieces in one bundle	Fewer pieces per set, sold in smaller counts

Where DomeStar Wins

The first thing DomeStar gets right is that it sells you the whole picture instead of just the pumpkins. Thirty of the thirty-eight pieces are maple leaves. That sounds like filler until you set them out. A pumpkin sitting alone on a table looks like a pumpkin sitting alone on a table. A pumpkin with three leaves scattered around the base looks like somebody arranged something. I did not understand that until I had the leaves in my hand, and now I would not buy a set without them.

The second is scale. Most fake pumpkins in a store are sized for outdoors, because that is where people put them, and a nine inch pumpkin on a mantel looks like you set a child's toy up there. The DomeStar pieces are small on purpose. The listing gives the packed set as about fifteen inches wide and under five inches tall, and a five inch base diameter, so you know before it arrives that these are tabletop pieces and not porch pieces. Three of mine sit on the mantel around the candles and they do not crowd anything.

The third is storage, and I care about this more every year. The whole set, leaves and all, drops into one shallow basket that lives on a shelf in the basement. No bin, no tissue paper, no boxing up eight separate pieces so the stems do not snap. I have a basement full of bins already. Anything that does not need its own bin gets a good mark from me.

And the fourth is consistency. Every pumpkin in the box matches the others, so eight of them read as one set rather than eight strangers. If you are the kind of person who notices when one piece in a display is a slightly different shade of the same idea, that matters.

Where Artmag Wins

Now the other side, because this is not a rigged comparison. If your plan is three pumpkins on the front steps, one by the door and one on the porch table, the DomeStar set is the wrong tool and I would tell you so to your face. The pieces are too small to be seen from the road, and a row of them across a step just looks like a row of small things. The Artmag assortment runs larger, with pieces sized like a real sugar pumpkin, which is what a front step actually wants.

Artmag also wins on the finish. The stems are fuller and the surfaces vary more from piece to piece, so a group of them looks gathered rather than manufactured. The DomeStar pieces are painted foam and they are honest about it once you are holding one. From four feet away nobody knows. From arm's length, the Artmag is the better looking pumpkin.

And weight, which sounds like a strange thing to judge a pumpkin on until you have watched one roll off a porch table. The entire DomeStar set weighs a hundred and ninety-five grams. On a covered porch with a breeze, mine will slide. The heavier Artmag pieces stay where you put them, and on open steps in October that is the difference between decor and something you are chasing down the walk in your slippers.

What Two Falls on a Covered Porch Taught Me

I bought the DomeStar set in September of last year, mostly because I was tired of buying real pumpkins from the farm stand and watching them go soft by the middle of October. Real ones do not last in a warm house. You get three good weeks and then a soft spot and a smell. I wanted something I could put out the last week of September and leave alone until the leaves came down.

Five of them went on the small table by the front door, on the covered porch, under the roof and out of direct rain. The other three went on the mantel with the leaves scattered around them and the flameless candles. That is where they have lived both falls, and that is the whole system. Nothing gets moved. Nothing gets restyled. I set them out and I stop thinking about them, which is the entire point of a decoration as far as I am concerned.

The one lesson from the first fall was wind. Because they weigh almost nothing, a gust coming across the porch would shift them an inch at a time until the arrangement was a pile. The fix was a shallow basket I already had. Now all five sit inside the rim, the wind pushes the leaves around and the pumpkins stay put. The listing actually names a basket as the container type, which I found funny once I had already figured it out the hard way. If you buy this set for a porch, buy a basket at the same time.

Two falls in, nothing has cracked, nothing has faded enough that I noticed, and nothing has come apart. They are light and they feel light, and if you hand one to a grandchild it will get squeezed. That is an honest limitation, not a defect. Light is the trade you make for small and cheap and easy to store.

The Leaves Are Half the Set

I want to say one more thing about the maple leaves, because I think people skim over them in the listing and then wonder why their display looks thin. Thirty leaves is a lot of leaves. They go on the mantel, they go in the basket on the porch table, and mine end up on the dining room table in a loose line down the middle when we have people over. Those leaves are what turn three pumpkins into a centerpiece.

The one annoyance is that they are light enough to migrate. One will end up under the couch. One will follow you into the kitchen on the bottom of a sock. I gather them up in January with the rest of it and they go back in the basket. For what they do to the look of a room, I will sweep up a leaf or two.

Thirty of the thirty-eight pieces are leaves. That is not filler in the box, that is the reason three small pumpkins on a mantel look like somebody arranged them.

The Thing Neither Set Fixes

Neither one of these sets gives you height. A pumpkin on a flat surface is a pumpkin on a flat surface, and if you want a mantel or a porch table that reads from across the room, you need something tall behind it. For me that is the flameless pillar candles on the mantel, which are already there for the fall and stay through Christmas. On the porch it is the door itself and the brick around it. If you are picturing a full harvest display out of one box, you will be disappointed by both products, and it will not be the pumpkins' fault.

The other thing neither one fixes is dust. Foam and fabric both hold it. Mine get a pass with a dry cloth when they come out of the basket in September, which takes about two minutes for the whole set, and then they are fine until January. I mention it only because people expect decorations to stay clean sitting out for three months, and nothing does.

Who Should Buy Which

Buy the DomeStar set if your pumpkins are going indoors or on a covered porch. The mantel, the entry table, the dining table, a shelf in the hall, a windowsill. Buy it if you want the leaves included and you do not want to shop for them separately. Buy it if you have limited storage and you want the whole thing to disappear into one basket on a shelf in the basement. Buy it if you are decorating a small house on a normal budget and you want the room to feel finished without a bin you have to carry up the stairs. That is my situation exactly, and after two falls I would buy it again.

Buy the Artmag pumpkins if your display lives outside on open steps, a porch rail, a planter by the walk or a bale of straw. Buy them if you want pieces that read from the road, or if you care about stems and surface detail the way some people care about the backs of their Christmas stockings. Buy them if wind is a real problem where you live and you do not want to fiddle with a basket. You will pay more per piece and you will get fewer of them, and you will get a better pumpkin for the spot you have in mind.

And if you want both, that is not silly. A heavier set on the steps and a small set inside is how most houses I know actually end up decorated. Just do not buy the small set expecting it to carry the front porch, because it will not, and do not buy the big set expecting to store it in a basket, because you will not.