We needed to do an educational activity for our service club as I scrambled around the internet looking for a worthwhile enlightening idea. I came up with nothing which looked like it would work with new baby, busy family, diverse ages. Until I came across a few really cool pumpkins and remembered a kind friend who is a master carver. A quick phone call and check of the weather and she agreed to teach us how to master carve pumpkins.
The kids were excited to get this instruction, we worked as a team and got the chores done in advance and dinner pulled together so we could take it and share with grandma.
A finished project. these are truly back breaking work. Bending over pumpkins for an hour or so is tedious but the results are pretty cool. Coupled with tools that are so superior to the old standby kitchen knives this was an enjoyable experience.
Our patient teacher in the middle. She helped us make pictures when we lacked the patience and skill to make the cuts fine enough. See that wheel barrow full of pumpkin guts? pig food! Greg was so excited he's always on the lookout for animal feed. These guts also secured and cushioned the finished pumpkins on the ride home. As our van is full of people these days we used a trailer to haul the pumpkin masterpieces.
Each pattern is transferred via dotting the pumpkin shell. This takes a while especially intricate patterns like Harold selected.
Some just watched and snuggled. The weather man was wrong, although we didn't get rained on it was blustery and cool.
To preserve the carving plastic is applied and secured with hot glue to preserve the faces for a few days,
Aliza's unicorn
Addie did Belle
Reed a lego man
Unicorn- Aliza, Lego- Reed, Owl- Mark, 2 horses- Harold
Anna's
Afton did a little pumpkin which she has been carrying around keeping it safe within her eye sight.
All lit up
Millie's pumpkin. Those small hand saws made curving smiles a cinch. Our teacher also had shapes with the bumpy edges to make perfect face patterns so every shape was uniform. NICE!
Livy's toothy smile and John's grim reaper pumpkin
My husband swears the right tools make jobs much easier this was surely proved carving 10 plus pumpkins in about an hour. A good time was had by all thanks to our teachers the Hopmans. We moved on to dinner at Grandma's house. We filled the house with lots of bodies. The kids were patient and good. It was a nice evening together. I learned that by planning ahead we have the Sundays' I hope for just heading into Sunday without a plan leaves us wide open to nice but not necessary side roads or maybe I just need to roll with the inevitable life happens on the farm sometimes and be grateful it's not every Sunday that things are chaos.
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