Pumpkin Carving 101

I love Halloween, especially the pumpkin carving part. Several years back I bought one of those pumpkin carving kits and have had a ball trying to make some pretty intricate pumpkins faces. The process involves taking the pattern, taping it to the pumpkin surface, using a little poker and transferring the pattern to the pumpkin face with a series of dots. Once the dots have been transferred, you remove the paper and rub white flour into the dots so that they are easier to see. Then with a little tiny saw, you just start cutting out the pieces connecting the dots as you go. Certain pumpkins took longer to do, but it takes roughly a couple hours to do each pumpkin. Below you'll see the pumkins I've done over the last 4 years.

This was the first one I did Halloween 2002. I actually repeated this pumkin pattern in 2003 and entered it into the Ward pumkin carving contest and won. Go Cougars!

Halloween 2003 was all about Elmo. This one was harder than it looks trying to make the fur look good.


How can we forget Halloween 2004. This pair of pumkins was by far the most difficult, but we got a lot of comments as people came to the door that year.


And finally we have Halloween 2005. With the move, we really didn't have any trick-or-treaters come to our home, so I carved this one very quickly and displayed it on the inlaws porch. This one only took me about an hour to carve, but thought it was cool.


I'm sure that our next neighborhood will enjoy my future pumkins. Who knows . . . maybe 10 years down the road I'll be cutting my pumkins with lasers.