Tuesday, October 30, 2007

The Horror Week: Day 2 – That’s not a moon, it’s a pumpkin!

Here is the only pumpkin you need ever carve for Halloween.


Provided from Wired’s Geek-o-Lantern image gallery.

Yep, got the pumpkin carved last night and it survived its first night on the porch. We decided to go with your traditional Jack-o-Lantern rather than the Death Star. I was all gung-ho for carving myself up a Death Star but then I realized I didn’t really want to spend that much time carving this year, not to mention I didn’t want to buy carving tools. Also, waiting until this point in October means you’ll only get the half-rotted, side-show freak pumpkins and not the perfectly round Aryan pumpkins that are displayed when the pumpkins first come out.

If were up to me though, we’d use carved pumpkins as our only source of porch lighting year round. It’s partially that I get to pretend I’m a mad doctor performing lobotomies. If you need help carving pumpkins just go here or here for some instructions. You can get some pretty cool stencil designs at the Homestar Runner website (I’m kind of partial to the Bear holding a Shark pumpkin stencil – seen here carved by Chris Sims), but honestly, just download any picture you like, greyscale it in photoshop then adjust the levels to only get black and white. Et voila, you have a stencil you can attach to your pumpkin. Use a pointy piece of plastic to poke an outline around the areas you want to cut, grab a flexible knife and cut to connect the dots and you have total pumpkin awesomeness.

So, Dr. Doom-kin as carved by Dave Campbell, what do you think about The Horror Week?

Oh, c’mon, just say it.
Seriously, man, you said you’d be a good sport.
You can destroy us all later. C’mon, I’ll give you some rockets.


Cool. I mean the candy, not actual rockets, by the way.

2 comments:

Jan Triska said...

Cool...but imagine the elaborate tool set you'd need to carve some of these puppies out. And it would take dozens of hours in some cases. The pumpkins must be getting all mushy by the time the carver's done with them...

joncormier said...

You just need one, maybe two, wood working tools which can be pretty cheap.