It's The Great Pumpkin!

Mid October a few years ago, I found myself feeling inspired and crafty and standing in the aisle at the supermarket, paging through a holiday magazine looking at those fancy schmancy pumpkins that are carved into amazing Jack O'Lanterns.

I decided that it didn't look that difficult and that I ought to make one. The timing was good, a couple of weeks before Halloween. It would last, I thought. This couldn't be that difficult, I was certain.

I bought a good size pumpkin, parked myself on a large towel on the garage floor on a sunny afternoon with the garage door open and the radio on and went to work. Cleaned it out, carved the lid, and then prepared to make my image.

I pulled out a Peanuts color book and found a great image of Snoopy that would be perfect on a pumpkin.  Snoopy is requisite Halloween subject matter, considering The Great Pumpkin.  I taped it to the pumpkin, took a toothpick and poked dots all along the lines that needed to be carved out; sort of a 'carve along the dotted line' idea.  Dotting done, I removed the color book page and set to work with my special pumpkin carving knife.

At first, things seemed to be going well and I was fairly pleased with the results... but then I overestimated the carve and tried to fix it with extra toothpicks pushed into the inside side of the pumpkin and superglue.  A word to the wise... superglue does not work on pumpkins.  It does, however, work very well on fingers, paper towels, cloth towels and plastic carving knives.  

In the end, I was relegated to carving my usual simple Jack O'Lantern face into a new pumpkin. 

I'll leave the fancy carving to the pros!
  

Have a Happy Halloween!

 

One for Viaggiatore



 

A Snoopy for me