Spookily Easy Pumpkin Carving

Hello!

With the autumnal season in full swing it means only one thing: Halloween! Although I have never really celebrated Halloween, when the shops are filled with bundles of pumpkins, I can never resist buying a few to have some carving fun. 

I have always been envious of the people who are masters in the art of carving pumpkins producing elaborate designs, while I am creating the standard triangular eyed, zig-zag mouthed monster that never ends up looking remotely scary. So this year I decided to be a little bit clever (some may say cheat) and see if I could use a template to carve my pumpkin. Believe it or not it actually worked, so I would like to show you how I did it so that we can all be masters of pumpkin carving, if you aren't already one... 

This is what I needed to be able to carve my pumpkin. As you can see I managed to find a cat themed template! Just wonderful!

Before I start to cut my pumpkin, I will always draw a circle around the top as a guideline for the hole that allows you to gut the pumpkin. Its so much easier than doing it free hand and brilliant for us perfectionists! 

 

 

This is the worst part of the pumpkin carving for me! I hate the smell, texture and mess it makes! Plus is pretty hard work scraping all the flesh from the edges (this sounds awful!) 

 Once you have got past getting all the insides of the pumpkin out, you will be able to stand back and receive lots of satisfaction from creating a lovely clean pumpkin! And now the fun part begins! 

When I went on the Internet, I was surprised at how many templates for pumpkins there are! You will literally have hundreds of great free designs to choose from to be able to impress all your friends and family!

 This part is a little fiddly and is easier if you have another pair of hands to help with sticking the template to the side of your pumpkin. To stick my template I just used sellotape and a lot of patience.

 

Once you have your template in place, you need to score the pumpkin with a knife around the guidelines. You dont need to worry about pushing your knife all the way through at this stage as you will be able to take the template off the pumpkin after and see the lines you have created with the kinfe. Once you have done that, you can push the knife all the way through, cutting your design out and leaving you will a beautiful, detalied pumpkin! No more boring pumpkins!

Here is the finished result of my pumpkin. I am actually very happy with it! 

Although I don't have a halloween party to show this off, I think it makes a really cute candle holder perfect for autumn and dark evenings. 

Have fun craving your pumkins! 

Cheerio!

x

Its beginning to look a lot like...Autumn!

Hi!

Its been looking very autumnal recently, so when I went out on a walk at the weekend to feed the ducks with some old bread (much more fun than throwing it away!)  I took my camera with my to take some pictures. I wanted to share with you a few of my favourite pictures. I'm no photographer, but I do enjoy taking the occasional picture :)

 

 

 

 

 

Every year I will usually collect a few conkers because I was told that they are a good repellent for spiders. Since I am deathly scared of the eight legged beasts, there hasn't been a spider season that has gone by that hasn't had my house filled with conkers in very corner. During my walk there were lots of conker trees so I decided to collect a few and see what I could do with them, other than using them to repel the spiders. Conkers come in all different shapes and sizes and have a really nice colour when they are nice a fresh, so I think they look great collected together in a glass bowl and put on the side as a cute little autumn decoration. Here it what you could do with just a few conkers and a very small amount of creativity skills! 

I think the conkers look really great between two candles - it gives it that extra touch and make it feel very autumnal! It could also be used as a really lovely centre piece if you are having a dinner party!

Conkers are so simple looking, i think they look equally as good on there own.

This just shows how you need hardly any creativity to be able to give yourself a unique, autumn themed centred piece! 

Cheerio!