The Scientist: Four minus one minus one plus four

Bonnie, Sean and I carved pumpkins the other night.

At first we had four pumpkins, but one rotted on our mantle. So then we had three.

Then, we brought in the two from the garage and one was rotted. So we only had two.

Next, we drove to Safeway, and bought four more. In the end, we had six. This is the story of the six pumpkin carvings.

We each had a large pumpkin and a small pumpkin.

You'll notice that mine was larger than Bonnie's or Sean's. Heh.

I wanted to do a cat of some sort on my large pumpkin, so I found a template on the internet and printed it out. I chose "Cat on a Broom". I pinned the template onto my pumpkin and used a pushpin to mark the outline of the template. You can kindof see the marks below (especially if you click on the picture for the zoom in):

Since we didn't have any "professional" fancy pumpkin carving tools, we used what we found around the house. The most effective tools by far were a set of steak knives. All of the amazing pumpkins you'll see below were carved using only steak knives. Now that, truly, is skill.

Here is my completed cat pumpkin, before tea light insertion.

Sean chose to use a template for his large pumpkin too, creating a skull and cross bones.

The green marks are from the sharpie he used to help follow the design.

Bonnie went free-style and made a scary face in her pumpkin, in the traditional style:

Here is the completed project:

After finishing our large pumpkins, we moved onto our smaller pumpkins. We had chosen three stencils of a related theme - the Wizard of Oz. I had the template for the lion, Bonnie for the scarecrow and Sean for the tin man. Here is an example of the template stuck to the pumpkin. I used a pushpin to mark the edges of the cutouts.

This was actually a pretty tricky design, since some of the lines were quite thin. I decided not to cut the eyes right out because they were very small and I thought I would break it instead, so I just shaved the skin off the eyes so some light would come through. Here is my completed lion:

Sean worked away at the tin man, happy to have an easier design than the skull and crossbones he had just finished.

My kitty cat, Pumpkin, wandered around abjectly throughout the evening. She was a little unhappy not being the centre of attention, but once she realized that pumpkin tasted good, she didn't leave the kitchen. She just wandered around eating up little bits of pumpkin that we had dropped. Is it weird when Pumpkin eats pumpkin? Hehe.