Thanksgiving Pumpkins

Happy Thanksgiving!

I've been MIA with my blog over the last month.  We've had a very challenging month at work and each night I could only muster enough energy to make dinner and then veg out the rest of the evening.  Couple that with a healthy to-do list and it was inevitable that the blog would be put on the back burner.  Now that we've turned a corner at work, I have more time to write.  So here is the first of many holiday related offerings coming over the next few weeks.  I present to you the Thanksgiving Pumpkin.

I'm not into Halloween so my pumpkins are usually decorated for fall or Thanksgiving.  But you know  how it goes... hack into the pumpkins too early in the season and they are rotting away by the end of October.  Forget about November.  To circumvent the rotting, I decided to try a technique called etching this year.


Etching is the process of removing the dark orange skin on the pumpkins to reveal the lighter orange/yellow meat of the pumpkin without cutting all the way through.  One of the main benefits is that you get a much longer porch life out of your pumpkin.  I etched my pumpkin on October 26th and it's still going strong with zero signs of rotting.  Granted, the temperatures have started to plunge so it will probably start getting soft soon.  Nonetheless, my pumpkin has been festively decorated and lasted a full month at the least!  Not too shabby.

I started with an etching kit that was purchased at my local grocery store.

I started by printing out "Give Thanks" in a cute font on my printer.  I taped the paper to my pumpkin and this was used as a template guide for using the perforater tool.  

I used the perforating tool to outline all of the letters.  Once most of the font outlining was complete, I removed the paper and there were small dots on the pumpkin.

The dots are a little hard to see with the photo.  All that is left is to carve out the dark orange skin between the dots using the carving tool. 

This is my first pass through with the carving tool.  It actually was a lot faster than I expected it to be but I needed to go back over it to fine tune my font.

Once my letters were in decent shape, I free handed a scallop edge along the pumpkin stem.   I covered all exposed pumpkin flesh with vaseline to keep it from drying out.  This prolongs the life of the pumpkin as well as protect it from insects and other critters that may want to take a bite out of it.

I am pretty excited with the results!  I would DEFINITELY use this etching technique again but I would use different tools.  The blade kit I had was terrible.  You'll notice that the blade holder is shaped a lot like a handle razor.  (see second picture)  This was problematic because I wasn't able to see the blade making contact with the pumpkin and that affected my etching lines.  I would suggest skipping a kit and instead using a good, old fashioned chisel or even a flat head screw driver for the most control.  I would also use a push pin for the font outlining.

Overall, not bad for my first try.  :)