HOWTO carve a pumpkin by hammering cookie-cutters into it

Here's a set of instructions for "carving" precise shapes into a pumpkin by knocking them through using a cookie-cutter and a mallet.

Place a cookie cutter on the pumpkin and tap firmly with a rubber mallet until at least half of the cutter has pierced the pumpkin's shell. (If the pumpkin shell is thin, the cutter may be pounded all the way through the shell.)

Remove the cookie cutter, using a needle-nose pliers if needed.

With a small serrated knife (or the serrated saw from a pumpkin carving kit), follow the pattern made from the cookie cutter to cut out the image, making sure to cut all the way through the shell.

(via Super Punch)

• [eggonstilts]

  I’m going to try this with my Halloween pancake molds.

  http://www.flickr.com/photos/hjus/4067733376/in/set-72157622516146536/

• [Shibi_SF]

  What a great idea!

• [Donald Petersen]

  Aw, that’s cheatin’, that is.  Hardly qualifies as carving.  Then again, whatever gets more jack o’lanterns out there is a good thing.

  I have no drawing or carving talent, and for most of my life I carved Charlie Brown-worthy jack o’lanterns with triangular eyes and jagged teeth and felt it was the best I could do.  Then in 2008 I downloaded a Sarah Palin jack o’lantern template, spent a couple of hours carefully carving it, was suitably horrified by the result, and have made stencils out of high-contrast photos ever since.  Just take a picture of yourself (or a suitably scary loved one) while lit from a harsh oblique angle (to obtain good, sharp shadows), print the photo as a 2-tone image the right size for your pumpkin, use pushpins to create a dot-to-dot outline of the stencil, and spend a good long time carefully carving out the white sections, leaving the black behind.  At first it’ll look totally wrong, like you completely screwed it up, but then once you light it, you may be pleasantly surprised at the results.  Here’s how mine came out, with the bottom one being my experiment from 2009, and the other three being me and my wife and our daughter from last year.  (These are time-consuming, at about 2 hours each, so my 1-year-old son forgave me for not doing his last year.)  

  Those in a hurry can do the cookie-cutter thing.  But I’m of the school that demands that one take one’s time with matters Halloweeny.

• [CharredBarn]

  Then deep fry the plugs of pumpkin rind and hand them out on Hallowe’en as treats.

• [sam1148]

  I want classic pumpkins. The typical “jack o lantern”.  Templates and cutouts that look like anything other than a scary pumpkin head face, just leave me cold.

  Same with Christmas lights, I want colors in the bulbs, and kitschy ornaments, and maybe even one of those rotating color wheel lights.  Pure white bulbs and pristine theme ornaments look like a department store display to me. 

  Tho..I do have a battery powered Disney Monorail that goes under the tree…with a sound chip.
  “Please Stand Clear of the Doors…”.

• [3William56]

  For something a little more freeform, try carving with an electric drill (battery is best) instead of a knife. Keep the bit rotating nice and fast, and you have effectively a lightsabre for pumpkins. Different bit sizes give you different cut rates and “pen” sizes, and allows lots of fine detailing. I’m pretty cack handed, but pulled the attached off last year.

• [Spriggan_Prime]

  Lazy cheaters. The Great Pumpkin does not approve. Do not anger the pumpkin!

• [mccrum]

  We’ve been slicing off the exterior orange but not going all the way through, this allows for some great translucent effects, especially if you scrape away on the inside as well, there’s about half an inch of pumpkin left on the one on the right.
  http://www.flickr.com/photos/nightimages/5119964374/in/photostream/

  • [Donald Petersen]

    I dig those!  I can’t quite pull that off… everytime I get the flesh thin enough to be translucent with a tealight or two, I end up punching through it.  And I’m just traditional enough to insist on candlelight.

    • [penguinchris]

      I free-formed this penguin, just scraping off the surface with a pocket knife (as I recall) and then scraping out from the inside. It’s just one tealight in there. You probably couldn’t see it from the street, but this was on the back anyway – on the front I did a larger koala face with similar techniques.

• [Jesse Starks]

  Carved this pumpkin last year…

  put a piece of paper over my macbook screen and jacked the brightness. created a pencil trace.

  taped to the pumpkin and went to work with wood carving kit