All Hallows Eve Pumpkin Tutorial

In honor of Halloween every year I carve a pumpkin.  As the years have progressed my pumpkins have gotten more elaborate.  This year I made the above owl.  I love owls and think they are a very majestic beings.

Unfortunately, I am not doing much for Halloween this year.  The party I was going to co-host was cancelled do to an illness in the family.  I had a costume and everything.  I had been saving pins on Pinterest for ages with ideas for hors d'oeuvres and treats.  Oh well, in the end how can I fight the big C and insist on a party?  I can't.  so instead I just have to stay home.

This pumpkin took me a good three hours to carve.  I picked a good night for it.  You see we had a freak snow storm here in NY.

My house under the blizzard.

The trees were amazing.

Some trees had not lost their leaves yet.

I made stuffed apples, learned how to knit, drank hot apple cider with brandy and finished off the night with some pumpkin carving.

Slow cooker stuffed apple.

Apples and twenty year old Portuguese brandy.

Here's how I did the carving.  

First I cleaned off the scooped out all the filling of my very large pumpkin.

The filling.

I cut a hole in the bottom of the pumpkin because it makes it look better in the day time.

Then I downloaded the stencil from Martha and enlarged it (I had to stick three pages together to get the whole thing on the pumpkin).

Here is the original Martha version
(she had a white pumpkin but I could not find any.)

To transfer the pattern onto my pumpkin I tapped the copy to the pumpkin and punched holes around the outline.

Then I removed the outline and carved away all the light grey leaving the dark grey as pumpkin skin in tack.

I used my linoleum carving tools to carve out only part of the pumpkin shell, that way the light would shine through.  In the end I also had to work to scrape out a lot of the pumpkin from the inside to let the light through.  I used a store bought pumpkin light instead of a candle to be more safe.

I like how it turned out in the end.

Happy Halloween Everyone!!!  Hope you are having fun for the holiday.  

Where I party: