Saturday, October 26, 2013

Halloween Jack O'Lanterns

One of my favorite parts of Halloween is carving Jack O'Lanterns! 


Last year we went to Katie's apartment for a pumpkin carving party after our Maine Wedding Reception.  It was dubbed Pumpkinfest: Bar Harbor Edition.  It was a great night of pumpkin carving, food, friends and fun. 


Eliot went online to find some jack o'lantern stencils for us to use.  I hadn't carved a pumpkin in such a long time!  We selected Kermit and Tigger since they seemed easy.  



I ended up getting a little bit of help carving Tigger (from the wonderful BJ) with carving out the details on mine.  And yes, I am still wearing my tiara.  I had it on at the reception and we stuck it in my hair pretty good so I just left it on instead of wrecking my hair style. Once a princess, always a princess!


Eliot worked really hard on Kermit.  He was pretty happy with the result.


Our Disney loving pals BJ, Katie and Kathleen also made Disney pumpkins.  They carved out Captain Hook and Malificent!  After all, what's Halloween without a few Villains?


Katie designed her own stencil and made Floyd, her signature flamingo!


Here's a group picture with how they turned all out!


At the party, Eliot severely caught the pumpkin carving bug.  He created a group on Facebook to share some of the templates that he found online with all of us.  He also wanted to carve pumpkins... lots and lots of pumpkins.

Since you can't just go out and buy pumpkins all year long, we decided to look into some of the plastic ones you can get at craft stores.  They also aren't as messy and they won't spoil so you can enjoy them for many years to come.  Luckily for us, Michael's had a large supply that were 60-70% off so we stocked up on them.  Eliot has made a few jack o'lanterns with the fake pumpkins.  (They are on sale right now if you're lucky enough to find some lingering at your local craft store.)



Eliot wanted one for our apartment last Halloween, so he carved out another Kermit for us to enjoy. (We kept the real pumpkins at Mom and Dad's house since we weren't sure how they'd survive the 5 hour drive back to Boston.  Plus, we knew that they'd actually get trick or treaters and our apartment building would not since you had to key into the building.)  


Shortly after that, he made Captain Jack Sparrow.


He also found a stencil for Eeyore.


And a week or so ago, he added Tigger to our collection.


I'm trying to convince him to make me a Tinkerbell pumpkin with lots of pixie dust like this one I found on Pinterest!  I might even paint it lime green with some of my left over wedding paint!


If you're interested in carving some Disney pumpkins, the websites that Eliot found to get stencils to carve from are Zombie Pumpkins and Spoonful.  (You have to become a member of Zombie Pumpkins to get the stencils.)


Here is our current display of jack o'lanterns!  We use orange flickering LED tea lights to illuminate them.  (That way they can stay on for hours at a time and the LED lights won't melt the plastic of the fake pumpkins.)  They look great and you can't even tell that they're not real ones!  I'm hoping to add some Haunted Mansion hitchhiking ghost pumpkins to our collection next year!  °o°

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