Supplies You Need for Carving Pumpkins

Series Summary

A lit up Jack-O-Lantern is second only to trick-or-treating as an indicator that it's time Halloween. Lighting the Jack-O-Lantern is the culmination of an exciting Halloween ritual. The first step, obviously, is choosing the pumpkin. You have to choose just the one you want and that one will be the right one for you. Then you have to decide what design you want on you pumpkin and draw that design on your pumpkin. Next you have to cut open the pumpkin and remove the guts and seeds. After that, it's time to do the really exciting part of carving the pumpkin. You may ask, "How do you do all these things?" Well if you would like to learn how to choose a pumpkin, design a Jack-O-Lantern, and how to carve a pumpkin you have come the right place. Our expert Jack-O-Lantern designer can show you, for free, how to carve a pumpkin.

In this free Halloween how-to video series, learn how to carve a pumpkin from Halloween expert Matt Cail. Matt will teach you what you need to know about pumpkin carving, with tips such as what supplies you will need to carve your pumpkin, how to choose the right size pumpkin for a Jack-O-Lantern, how to choose designs for pumpkin carving, and how to prepare you pumpkin for carving. He will also demonstrate how to carve out the pumpkin lid, how to remove pumpkins seeds and pumpkin guts, how to draw eyes on a pumpkin, how to draw a mouth and nose on a pumpkin, how to begin carving a pumpkin, how to add weapons to a pumpkin, and how to light up a Jack-O-Lantern.

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail. And on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to creatively carve a pumpkin. Getting our tools together for creative pumpkin carving. Let's get started here. Okay, so a couple of these tools, these instruments if you will, are going to be familiar to general pumpkin carving...just your more traditional pumpkin carving. While other ones are going to be a little different; a little new. First we are going to have a couple of knives...sharper knives. So again, children, do not do this at home alone because we are going to need to make some pretty fine cuts again, so we are moving beyond butter knives. You, of course, can do that. It's just literally probably triple the expected amount of time. We are also going to have a carving tool. This is going to be for some of the finer cuts we will be making. It's going to have a glow stick; something a little different there. A fork; a flathead screwdriver. You can also use a Phillips for the purpose of what we are going to be using the screwdriver for a bunch of thumbtacks; probably about ten to twenty. There are going to be a bunch of options of what you are going to be able to use, but at least ten. We are also going to want to have a good black felt-tip marker; the more staining, the better. We want something that's going to be able to write on pumpkin skin without blending, blurring, etc. Last, but not least, we are going to have a scythe which is kind of just a plastic tool. It's not the real one, a plastic will do, so don't worry about that. And of course, who could forget? We are going to need a pumpkin!"