October 30, 2007

Blogging is light today because I have set myself the task of carving a moderately intricate pumpkin. However, my right (knife) hand has a bit of a cramp so I pause in carving to blog.

We got two nice sized pumpkins and this is the smaller one.

Some weeks (or should I say months) ago, Loblaws started to get in their Halloween stuff and I spotted this booklet of templates. I usually make a face on my pumpkin and I have got good at not carving all the way through the flesh so it glows nicely. But I have wanted to so something more intricate and I liked some of these motifs. For this pumpkin, I chose the one with bats and a moon. Why did I not draw one myself? To much work. The set comes with two carving tools but they are tiny saws and their purpose is to cut all the way through the flesh and to get the proper effect, you don't cut all the way through. As I said, I bought the kit for the templates.

After cutting the lid out and scraping out the guts, I draw on the template and make my first cuts. The one tool that came with the kit that was great, was the gut-scraping tool. I have always used a large soup spoon but this plastic scraper works much better. I also cut a small vent hole in the back of the lid area to allow oxygen in for the candle later.

I discover that making this intricate pattern is quite fussy, and no, I am not surprised. I have to be very picky in ferreting out the tiny bits of flesh. For the moon however, I have discovered the perfect tool - a serrated grapefruit spoon! More pix will follow tomorrow, with the pumpkins lit and all.

In the meantime, this is what happens to impatiens after the first frost hits. I shall have to dig all this out this week, in order to get it in the yard waste pick up day time slot, which is this Friday.