In my previous post, Playing Follow the Leader in a Corn Maze, I told you that Eric and I, along with my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, went to a pumpkin patch to pick our perfect pumpkins. Unless I was simply too young to remember it, I don’t think I’d ever been to a pumpkin patch before last Saturday. First, we took a hayride up and around a hill to a sea of pumpkins. Picking your own pumpkin is a lot of fun, but if you have issues with indecisiveness, picking the perfect pumpkin in the great pumpkin sea could take some time, so be prepared. ~smile~
Decisiveness is not my gift, but for some reason – and that reason could be that the hayrides were about to shut down for the day and we didn’t want to haul our pumpkins a mile up the road on foot – I quickly found my perfect pumpkin and was ready to go. After taking another hayride back to the main grounds, paying for our pumpkins, gawking at the biggest horse I’ve ever seen, and traversing the corn maze, we all headed home with our plump, perfect pumpkins.
After dinner, we set up the kitchen table for some pumpkin carving fun. We put a cheap, disposable table cover over the table and got to cuttin’. My pattern was a simple, silly face, so I was done in about an hour. My brother-in-law picked an equally simple pattern and was also done in about an hour. Eric picked a picture of an owl with a lot of detail, so it took him between 2-3 hours. My sister-in-law did a picture of a cat on a fence, which also had a lot of intricate detail. When everyone was finished, we put tea light candles in each pumpkin and lit those pumpkins up! It was so rewarding to see the end result! (To see a picture of all our finished products, click here!) If you have a canister full of recreational ideas, add this to the mix!
In September, or whenever stores start putting out Halloween supplies, you will likely be able to find pumpkin carving kits at local stores. We recommend finding a good, sturdy, serrated metal scooping spoon. This will dramatically cut down on the time it takes to clean out your pumpkin seeds and guts considerably, and the bigger the pumpkin, the bigger the pile of pumpkin innards. ~smile~
We did, however, run into a problem finding pumpkin face patterns we liked this year. We wanted fun patterns, but nearly everything we found was either evil or for children (e.g., Disney Princesses [which I would have liked, but somehow didn’t think my husband or brother-in-law would enjoy ~smile~]).
If you go out looking for patterns and they don’t have anything you like, you can also find and print patterns online as well. If you’d rather find a book of patterns in a store, just ask an associate where they keep their pumpkin carving kits!
This is super fun, artistic, and an out of the ordinary activity that you and your sweetheart can do together. It’s even more fun with a small group of people. My perfect pumpkin I found in the pumpkin patch is smiling at me while I type this. ~smile~ If you’ve never tried it, let this year be your year to do some pumpkin carving! (And don’t be too intimidated by a complex pattern – just find one you like, follow the directions and be careful – and it will come out beautiful!) Just because pumpkins are associated with Halloween doesn’t mean you have to make them look evil. Just carve a fun design and let it be part of your Fall décor. Have a super fun time and Happy Carving!