Pumpkin Carving 2018!

We had so much fun picking and carving our pumpkins this year! My mom saw this sign on our road and we followed it to get to a farmer’s pumpkin patch just down the road from us:

I love the way they displayed the pumpkins!

There was no one around, but there was a sign saying to weigh your pumpkin, calculate the price, and leave the money in a cash box. We really do live out in the country!

We chose these two:

I loved our pentagram pumpkin from last year!

I wanted to do something different this year, though, so my mom found a triple goddess image online and traced it from her computer screen onto a piece of paper. The crescent moons were too small in comparison to the goddess, so she traced the goddess first, then enlarged the image and traced the moons. She also made the arms shorter so they were not a full circle, then retraced her design. (That was necessary to keep enough of the pumpkin to show the design.) This is the pattern we ended up using:

I shaded in the parts to be cut out. Note: my mom used a washable marker to draw the design, but I didn’t know that and used a permanent marker to color it in. Don’t do that if you want to be able to get the ink off later!

Before we got started with the carving, we turned on my Samhain playlist. I love all of my music on Pagan Music Playlists, but this is is one of my very favorites!

My mom cut around the top and removed the lid:

We saved the seeds for later!

Thoroughly cleaning out your pumpkin really helps to keep it from rotting too quickly:

I dried off the outside, then my mom taped our design onto the pumpkin:

Then she took a sharp knife and used the point to score the pumpkin all the way around the shaded area:

She removed the pieces as she went along:

Once the design was scored into the skin of the pumpkin, my mom removed the remaining paper:

Then she carefully cut the design all the way through the pumpkin and gently removed the pieces. She says to cut out many small pieces rather than try to remove the entire shape at once.

If you used a washable marker, you can now wipe off any remaining ink with a bit of alcohol:

We used the same method for our jack ‘o lantern:

We had lots of seeds! I washed and shelled them to use in recipes.

Here are our two pumpkins!

I made vegan hot cocoa with cinnamon and topped it with Dandies’ pumpkin flavored marshmallows!

We took our pumpkins outside and then waited for it to get dark.

Then we lit the candles!

I love how they turned out!

Happy Halloween and Blessed Samhain!