fabricate: Pumpkins

Another favorite of the season. Pumpkins! They are perfect for soups, pies, cakes, cookies and the creative possibilities are endless when it comes to decorating with them. Today I am talking about carving.

I remember when carving pumpkins was done with a kitchen knife. It was pretty limiting in what you could do. Then came Pumpkin Masters! The first year my sister and I discovered Pumpkin Masters carving tools we went nuts. I think we carved 20 pumpkins!! It was so much fun.

Since then, every year we carve a lot of pumpkins. Some patterns have become yearly favorites. Here’s a tip. If you love a particular pattern, scan it. Scanning them is great because you can re-use your patterns and you can resize them specifically for your pumpkin.

This one is a cheery classic:

Or how about this spooky favorite:

This one is called “Highly Perturbed” I love his flaming face. After carving this face 3 or so times I thought I should immortalize this one and try …..

(the sound of fan fare)

The carve-able craft pumpkin! These are great. They are light weight, easy to store and you only have to create it once.

I am a fan on the Celebrate It craft pumpkin sold at Michaels. Their paint doesn’t chip like “other” craft pumpkins. By now these are at least 50% off. The one dilemma I had was how to carve them. I attempted it once with a pumpkin saw, but that was messy and a LOT of work. It ended up being more time consuming than carving a real pumpkin. I tried the saw sold with the craft pumpkins but didn’t find it to be any better. So I researched online about the best way to carve craft pumpkins and found a recommendation for this tool:

I purchased this electric hot tool from Joann's. It retails for $30. It comes with seven tips: one straight cutting point, one hook cutting tool for details, two for soldering: cone point and square tip and three wood burning tips: tapered, texture-n-tone and mini flow points, lead free solder and a tool stand. for carving the craft pumpkin, I used the straight cutting tip that looks like an Exact-o-knife.

Okay, this tool, was AWESOME!

I carved 6 or 7 craft pumpkins in one morning. This tool cuts these craft pumpkins like butter!

I was so excited to create pumpkins with this phrase inspired by the 1962 novel by Ray Bradbury and also the choir song in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

You can come up with your own pattern ideas. I printed the phrase from a word doc. I created on my computer. I used Burton’s Nightmare for the font. The pattern for the “wicked” pumpkin was from an image I found online. There are a lot of pumpkin images online that you can use to create pattern. Essentially the carved portions are the highlighted areas and the remaining part of the image are the shadows. Here are a couple that I found..