Living in apartments for the last 5 years has really limited Amy and I’s exposure to the whole Halloween/Trick-Or-Treating thing, and although I’m not as big a fan of Halloween as Jason Santa Maria, I am excited about giving out candy this year at our new house. We live in a very well-established neighborhood with lots of families, so I’m guessing we’ll have droves of Pirates, Princesses, and… iPods? to treat. We’ve got a long, wooded sidewalk that winds up to our front door that would be great for luminaries, and last night we carved a couple pumpkins to go by the front door:

Shrek and Gators Halloween Pumpkins

You can click on the picture for Amy’s post (and more pictures), or just hover over it to see what they look like in the light. Amy found a pattern for her Shrek Pumpkin online at CarvingPumpkins.com. I decided I wanted to do a Gators pumpkin, but couldn’t find a pattern anywhere, so I made my own using a wallpaper I found online. I had to work with it a bit in Photoshop to get a black and white pattern to go by, so if there’s any Gator fans out there wondering how to make one of these:

  1. Download this image.
  2. Print it out as big as you can.
  3. Clean out your pumpkin and tape the pattern on where you want it.
  4. Poke holes around all the black areas.
  5. Remove the paper pattern.
  6. Cut along the dotted lines with a pumpkin carving saw.

I probably make it sound too easy. It took us both about 3 hours to get our pumpkins carved, but neither of us have done intricate pumpkin carving before…so I’m sure it might take some people less…but it’s really not that hard.