Halloween is a great time of the year

by | Jul 17, 2013 | Shopping

Recent Articles

Categories

Archvies

Halloween is one of those wonderful times of the year that can be comparable to Christmas, it’s full of fun times and it calls for decorations. Just as we decorate our homes at Christmas with Santa Clause, reindeer and plenty of snow, at Halloween it’s time to bob for apples, light big bonfires, play silly pranks and carve jack-o-lanterns from pumpkins.

Here in the states we are lucky to have the large easy to carve pumpkin as the recognized symbol of Halloween, in Ireland and Scotland they use a turnip which must be very hard to carve and it would certainly be hard to fit it with a candle.

There are a few things about pumpkins that do bother me, foremost among them is the time they take to carve and how little time they last. It seems that in this hustle bustle world we live in there is little enough time as it is than to take a few hours to carve a magical jack-o-lantern only to see it turn to mush on the front porch in a day or two. This is one of the reasons why I was happy when carvable foam pumpkins started showing up in big box stores and crafts stores.

Because of the lack of time to do a lot of things right, the foam pumpkin is ideal for me, I can buy it early and work on it whenever I find a bit of spare time. As I am not the most creative person in the world, I also find that with the patterns that are available, my pumpkin is far better looking than the ones I used to cut with a butchers knife. All I need to have to do a great job is a hot knife and a dremel tool. The wall thickness of the foam pumpkin is only about a half an inch so it’s easy to cut through and with the dremel tool it’s also easy to sculpt, something I could never do with a real pumpkin. With a combination of cutting through the wall and sculpting into the wall, the effects that I can get are really great.

Once I get the carvable foam pumpkin just the way I want it, I cut a hole in the back and insert an LED candle light, the effect is every bit as good as a real pumpkin, there was no sticky mess, I did it in my time and if I want, I can use it again in October of next year.

Related Articles