Even if you have left it to the last minute don't stress you do not need much more than a pumpkin and a tea light to have your own Halloween pumpkin.
Most of you will be more talented than us at your first go carving a pumpkin, but for those few that are as bad as us let me start by saying the process is very forgiving. Your finished carving may look a bit of a calamity as ours did, but when you put the candle in at the end and light it some magic happens and it ends up looking pretty good.
We can't stress enough, if you feel you have messed it up don't give up. Keep going we thought our first one was a disaster (we almost threw it in the bin) until we lit it at the end.
Size wise, if you are making your own template it will probably be a little smaller than an A4 sheet of paper so find a pumpkin to suit. Ours were both way too small so we recommend a pretty big pumpkin.
We just used a kitchen knife and a screwdriver so it is possible to do this last minute like we did, but you may want to get hold of some better tools. There are even pumpkin carving kits in the shops nowadays.
We just used a kitchen knife and a screwdriver so it is possible to do this last minute like we did, but you may want to get hold of some better tools. There are even pumpkin carving kits in the shops nowadays.
We wanted our pumpkin to be a little less scary than the usual fare as our kids were very young. When we had located a picture of what we wanted we made our own template on the computer. We used photoshop but you can use gimp (it's free http://www.gimp.org/), we just turned the image to black and white and selected a posterize filter. We knocked up a quick video to demonstrate.
You end up with a template which makes it easy to pick out your 3 different shaded areas. The lightest part will be a hole in the pumpkin (the screw driver was useful for poking the smaller holes). The darkest part will be where the pumpkin is uncut, and the medium area will be where you scrape away the outer skin and a little (but not all) of the white flesh.
We used a little tea light candle (from Ikea) but our 2 year old wanted to have it in her bedroom with her that night. I'm sure our parents would have been fine with that in the 70's but unfortunately for our kids even our usual cavalier attitude to risk wouldn't let us leave a lit candle in her bedroom.
We put a mini hand torch in one, and one of Alex's bike lights in the other which gave a pretty good result although not as good as the candle.
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