Pumpkins

I LOVE Halloween. This year, Halloween seems even more fun to me than it has the past few years; not because I didn't have fun before, but because of the anticipation. I know I mentioned this in a previous post, but the change of the seasons seriously gets me excited for the holidays!!

One of my favorite parts of Halloween (aside from all the great scary movies on TV) is carving pumpkins! I am obsessed. Seriously. We spent a couple of days this weekend carving pumpkins, and even though it took quite a while (it takes a bit longer when you have a little monkey to chase around!), I am seriously having to stop myself from running out and buying more pumpkins to carve!

N and A came over one day and we had a play date/pumpkin carving afternoon. I made pumpkin patterns for us of Audia and A's faces. I had read somewhere online that you can use wood carving tools (which thankfully I still have from my printmaking days at ASU!) to carve away the skin of the pumpkin so that you can have multiple shades rather than just the black-and-white style of pumpkin pattern, so I used photoshop to turn this:

into this: The carving part took quite a bit longer than I had estimated. N and I were laughing pretty much the whole time we were carving together because of how silly it seemed that we had decided to try to tackle such a project, especially while simultaneously watching our toddlers. But, a day and probably about 4 or 5 hours worth of carving later, I had this:

It turned out much better than I thought it would, and now that I've done one, I certainly have a lot better of an idea of how to make it work even better next year! Yes, that's right; I fully intend to carve a pumpkin with Audia's face on it every year until she tells me to stop. :-) Unfortunately, the squirrels ate her eyes even though we sprayed the pumpkins with red pepper spray before putting them outside. They'll stay in the garage until Halloween. Boy, am I ever glad I photographed them when I did!
We carved a couple of other pumpkins as well. What do you think?


Chris' pumpkin, side 1

Chris' pumpkin, side 2

Owl Pumpkin

Kitty Pumpkin

Our Pumpkin Family!