The Best of Halloween '08: Family Pumpkin Carving

Another one of our yearly family traditions is to carve the pumpkins we choose from Bert's Pumpkin Patch. Last year, Tyler had a smaller one that we carved in addition to the large family one. But since he chose a green one this year, he opted not to carve it so that it will last longer. When it comes to pumpkin templates, I am more in favor of the traditional pumpkin faces. Tyler, however, was very persistant about doing a spider this year for some reason. Since I am not a big fan of spiders, I wasn't so excited about the choice. I had already talked him out of a spider template at the Pumpkin Carving party we attended, because our pumpkin wasn't the right shape for the particular one he wanted. I told him we could save the spider one to do on our other pumpkin, hoping he would want something different by then. No such luck...he was dead set on a spider! I have to admit that it turned out looking pretty cool!

Billy and Tyler opened up the pumpkin and scooped it out.

Allison wasn't too enthusiastic about the opportunity to experiment with the top of the pumpkin. After touching it once, she made a "this is disgusting" face and pushed it away!

The inside of the hollowed out pumpkin seemed to be very interesting!

Tyler helped me with the carving.

I must say that this just wasn't my year for carving pumpkins! I completely butchered the bat template that we chose to do at the Pumpkin Carving party by cutting a line that I shouldn't have. As a result, the large bat came out with the moon, leaving a huge hole instead. That's the reason I didn't post a picture of the finished product in my last post. I ended up letting Tyler decorate the back of it with plastic pumpkin face pieces! So after this mishap, I was determined not to make the same mistake twice. Tyler even reminded me ahead of time. "Don't mess this one up like the bat one!" Well I didn't cut in the wrong spot this time, but I still managed to "mess it up." The design was supposed to have the spider holding on to a small Jack-o-Lantern (hence the big hole in that spot in the picture above). Things were going great - even with the skinny spider legs - up until I reached the little Jack-Lantern. When I tried to pull the pieces out from around the Jack-o-Lantern, he broke right in half and I had to cut him completely out! In my defense, it was a very thick pumpkin, but I was disappointed nonetheless! The spider looked pretty neat on his own, but I just wasn't satisfied. So the next morning, I cut out a new pumpkin from the back of our messed up bat pumpkin and attached it with toothpicks. This is the way it was intended to look...

Now that's better! (The cat is the Quan family pumpkin.)