Pumpkin Carving Tips
Carving a pumpkin can be a tedious task if you are not prepared for all that entails, for the best results possible, you should follow these tips! The first step, will obviously be to select the right pumpkin. An unhealthy pumpkin or one that is rotting is not one that you are going to want to deal with as it can turn into a big mess and will not last as long as a healthy pumpkin. To do this, you will want to select one that has no bruises on it, and one with a nice sturdy stem on it. If you can push the stem up and down in the pumpkin, it is probably a sign that it is not one that you are going to want. Also, you will want to check out and see how your pumpkin that you are selecting will sit. Sometimes you find that when buying a pumpkin they are all piled up, take the time and take your pumpkin off of the stack and sit in on the ground. You will also want to make sure that you have a nice surface to carve your shape onto. Bigger is better for pumpkins as shrinking down a design can be near impossible!
After selecting your pumpkin and taking it home, you will begin the first steps of carving. Step one will be to create a lid. For first time carvers, you will want ot make sure you do this right. You will want to cut around the stem, making a hole that you can get a candle into and out of with ease. IMPORTANT: While cutting this hole, you will want to angle your knife inwards towards the center of the pumpkin. If you do not do this, the lid will fall inside the pumpkin and can ruin a whole project! After the lid is done, you will want to begin removing the meat, or insides of the pumpkin. This consists of seeds and a stringy gunk in there that is nothing short of GROSS! Once you get most of the insides removed, we can move on to step number 2!
Now we are ready for step number 2. In this step, we will scrape out the sides of the pumpkin leaving a nice, mostly smooth, surface on the inside. When doing this step, make sure to be careful of how thick the walls of the pumpkin are, and try to keep it uniform at about 3/4 of an inch or 1 inch thick. This will make sure that carving is easier, the thicker the walls, the harder the pumpkin is going to be to carve. Also, when we carve out too much of the walls, the pumpkin will wilt up faster after it is carved, making it not last as long and turning black and curling up too soon, so avoid this at all costs! Take a look at the image below and you can see what a pumpkin that has been cleaned out to ideal will look like.
Next, we will want to place our pattern on the front of the pumpkin. Play around with this part, and move the pattern around to find its best spot. You will want to do this on a flat surface with the pumpkin sitting as it will when it is carved, that way our pattern will show up properly when it is sitting and light. After finding our spot, we will want to tape the pattern down, it is very hard to tape down a flat piece of paper to a round object, so along the edges of the pattern you will want to cut slits so that the patter will lay down on the pumpkin as best as possible. Once we do this and the pattern is secure, we can begin transferring the pattern to the pumpkin. I usually do this by using a tool from a tool kit that pushes a small circle in the pumpkin, then once transferred, it is like playing a game of connect the dots to carve it. Check out the images below.
Once the pattern is transferred, we will want to start carving. The way that you will carve, is the areas that you want to be light up, those are the ones that we will cut out. For instance, using the example of the pattern in step 3 (the second image) we would cut out and discard the darkened areas. You may be asking how to get the knife in without messing up the pumpkin or just puncturing. Well, most good kits come with a tool that will drill a hole into the pumpkin, thus giving you easy access to get your knife in. Be sure when drilling your hole, that you drill it into an area that is a discard piece of the pumpkin! Check out the images below for visual guide on what the process of this step is and the tools most people will be using!
Now, once we have it all finished we will want to clean the pumpkin off, and perhaps rinse it to get all the excess parts and trash out of the pumpkin. Gently wipe the outside down as well, as it is probably dirty from carving. Now we will want to do what we can to preserve our pumpkin and our work of art that we have created for as long as possible. One way to do this is to soak the pumpkin in water. Place the pumpkin in a bathtub of cold water. Ideally with the carved part facing downwards. This will allow the pumpkin to soak up water which will help it stay firm. You can also add a TINY bit of bleach to the water that will kill any germs. You can let it soak overnight. Once it is done, you can add some Vaseline or petroleum jelly to the cut parts of the pumpkin. This will seal the pumpkin so that all of the water that just got soaked up will not escape making it last longer! Once that is all done, we can now put our candle in the pumpkin, light it, and enjoy the fabulous jack o' lantern that we have just created! What to do next? Start back over at step one, and repeat again and again, and have a WHOLE family of pumpkins! ENJOY!
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