Unique Halloween Pumpkin Carving Tips

Jennifer Perkins: Your pumpkin may not exactly have a five o’clock shadow, here is going to look really good with a nice clean shave. I’m talking about a up in coming alternative of pumpkin carving, that’s called Shaving and it is easiest pumpkin pie. I’ve got couples of every technique I’m going to show you. The first step let’s talk about all the fun tools and tricks that go along with this technique. Right over here I have a set of wood carving tools, now you can pick this up but I guess the wood carvers store but I’ve got mine at the craft store. The fun thing about this woodcarving tools is they work great on a pumpkin. The trick is, you just want to go and take off the top layer of your pumpkin, it’s not like carving you don’t want to go all the way through and create an actual hole. So that when you put your life source inside it just going to be a shine through and have a really nice claw to it so, this work super easy and they also work great on the full pumpkins. As we have another tool over here which are a rotary tool that has a rotary tool attachment on the top and this rotary tool is actually made specially for pumpkins. So, let me show you how to shave with a rotary tool. Just cuts off that first top layer and make a little heart in there because I heart my little pumpkin and I want them to look cute. So, now you have 411 on pumpkin shaving and let’s go over here and I want to show you my friend thus swirl all over pumpkin. You’re getting very, very sleepy. The beauty of this swirl all over pumpkin is not only is the gorgeous, it could possibly hypnotize someone and that’s what I loved about it. Now, this is such a pretty pumpkin, we actually did this on a foam pumpkin. They come in shades too like while which is really, really cool and looks awesome with this effect. You can see that we win around and then we shave, they get a swirl a little pattern all the way around the entire pumpkin. And this technique is actually a lot easier than it looks. You will see that there is a tape on here and now what this is? Is curve the masking tape and what that mean is it will just kind of like bend and move so you can put it on more the swirly pattern. I’ve got it started; I can all the way going around. So once you have your pattern laid out all the way around your entire pumpkin. You will bring to your rotary tool and you would just start filling this in. Once I had that outline then I was just go to the whole thing, obviously it is worth the finish product because it is so pretty. You’re going to love it; all your neighbors are going to love it. You are going to have the basket and you can tell me what’s going to happen. With the little tape and some string we can make this really cool pattern in cord. And on this one as you see we’re bringing back that old favorite carving, don’t be sad we haven’t totally forgotten it. But we’re also bringing in the new school shaving, that’s kind of mixing enough. We get the best of both worlds on this one. And it’s surprisingly easy which we always love. Over here we have kind of what I did is I took two little strands of thread and tape them space out about a half an inch apart all the way around on the top of our gourd. From here, I’m going to take this thread and you can see there is a two pieces there and I’m going to split just like so. And I am going to bring it into a B pattern and then I will tape it to the bottom. You can see where they tape it already down here and I would finish doing that with all the string and when I was done, I will get this pattern that I’m getting my diamond shape. So, once we have our shape then we need to do our carving and our shaving. The ones that I carved you want to alternate with the one that you’re shaving. And you would alternate until you got something that eventually it look like this and it’s going to look even better once we like this baby up. Now, what I am going to do to it light up my gourd is I’m going to use what called a See Hook. Now this is something you could just find at the hardware store and they’re easy to come by and I’m going to screw it up into the top of my gourd. And what I’m going to used to lighted up are our holiday light. In this is what I’m going to hook on to my little see. And the cool thing about this is once you’ve hook it to the top it’s going to give a nice light all the way down. So now I’ve shown you a bunch of different tips and techniques so still have any excuse not to have the cutest pumpkin in your neighborhood.