Pumpkin Carving

This year wife and I decided to take our niece to pick pumpkins for carving.  She had never done this before so it was a fantastic thing I got to do with her.  I can still remember the first time I ever carved pumpkins, I felt like I'd been transported to a new world where I was allowed to do the things other children got to do all the time.  I think I was... maybe 20?  Maybe a little younger than that, but not by a whole lot, I'm pretty sure I was out of HS though.

It was such fun, and such a mess and my face looked all lopsided, but it was a liberating experience.  Halloween has been my favorite holiday ever since I was aware of what my personal tastes in things were.  I love black and lace and skeletons and vampires and all those creepy things and most of my favorite music is haunting.  When I was finally able to embrace it I found that I simply loved the decorations, the cobwebs, the fantastic colors of purple and black and blood splatters all over the place.  Simply the best, really.





Anyway, I loved carving pumpkins for the first time, and every time after that, so I wanted to share that joy with my niece.  We found a pumpkin patch and each picked out our own pumpkin.  Then we went home, took the table cloth off the dining room table, spread newspaper all over, pulled out the carving tools, and got started.

She was SO funny!  It was "stinky" inside the pumpkin, "Smells like a pumpkin!" I said.  The strings of innards felt, "slimy!" to her, and I said, "Yeah, lots of slimy yucky.  This is the fun part of pumpkin carving!".  Needless to say she was a little girly and I was a lot boyish, but it was a ton of fun to have the large metal bowl slowly fill with pumpkin seeds and goop.  I showed her several tricks for carving the sides clean and she showed us how she cut her top off too straight so her lid fell into her pumpkin.  Then she picked up this cat/bat pattern and started pressing it against the pumpkin to see where it would fit.  Only it didn't really, so the wife picked it up when she put it down.

Then she carefully carved out a face, allowing her Monster High dolls to watch the whole endeavor.  There was a lot of laughing, great scary music, stinky pumpkin slime and achy hands all around.  I picked a pattern to spread across mine and realized that it was the highest difficulty level of all the patterns that we'd gotten with our third carving set.  Why do I always pick the most difficult ones??

So here are the pumpkins to show off.  Lighting them was fun, and then we went to put them outside only to find out that it was raining!  *laugh*  Oh well, that's fine, we'll likely put our two out on Halloween for the trick or treaters and she took hers home to show off to family and put out later.

Lights on.

Lights Off.

Wife's Pumpkin Close Up.  (happy belated anniversary m'dear.)

Niece's Pumpkin Close Up.  Look at those eyelashes and everything!

And Mine Close Up.  These are all a little blurry, but turned out pretty well, and I rather like the way it turned out.  My hand was killing me by the time I got done with all those gravestones.  :P

Happy Halloween everyone, I hope you enjoy your time and have a safe trick or treat adventure tomorrow night!