This post recyled from October 2005.
If you are artistically-minded, get a large pumpkin and carve a nice "Jack O' Lantern" this Halloween (yes, all puns are intended).
Click >> here for a pretty large pattern to fit a good-sized pumpkin. You can enlarge the picture you see by going to the bottom right of the picture and clicking on the expanding arrows that should appear. This pattern is 800 pixels wide.
Transfer the pattern with pin pricks through the paper into the pumpkin.
Carve the yellow parts of the jack very deeply, but not so deeply as to go through the entire pumpkin. The goal is to leave a thin bit of yellow pumpkin flesh which the light will radiate through. Again, use the needle to ascertain pumpkin thickness.
If you need a larger or small pattern, simply increase or decrease the pattern size on a Xerox machine.
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1 comment:
Ha! Anyone can use PhotoShop! I want to see a photo here on November 1 of all your "Jack" o Lantern pumpkins glowing on your own porch. THAT will take some effort.
Actually, you want effort, try carving turnips (the orginal Celtic veggie-light for the evening before Columbus hit the New World and discovered squash). You will see why the Celts dumped 1,000s of years of tradition overnight to go with the pumpkin.
In my effort to bring a modicum of history to Halloween (okay, and also to show off my own growing talents), I set up a whole "Samhein" display with carved turnips, carved squashs (whatever grew that year and looks interesting, plus whatever my adjudicated youth grew at their program since it always makes them feel good for me to buy stuff from them), oak leaves and burning sage (which, yes, does smell like something else, but is now a huge neighborhood tradition and the one year the sage failed, everyone was quite upset. I think parents bring their kids to my house to sniff the sage! ;-)) If it's cold, I wear my 18th century Welsh outfit and have the cat on my lap and my Border Collie (we ignore that Shiba Inu part) at my side and hand out chocolate to kids that made an effort and leftover MRE candy or gum (why the US Army decided everyone needed Chiclets in their food ration is probably something we don't want to inquire about too closely!) to those who didn't (mostly older teenagers who think they can scope some free candy by smudging their face and lugging along a pillow case (at least wear some ragged clothes, dude!).
It is great fun and you can fry the turnip innards with butter and compost the collapsed pumpkins.
You should try it with the "Jack" pumpkins! :-)
Dorene
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