How to Ensure Enough Light Gets through Your 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. As you move from the knife to our carving tool and begin carving through these areas, there's a couple of things to keep in mind that you want to keep in mind; things that you want to do beyond just the basic carving. That is, first off, make sure that plenty of light can get through. I've seen many a pumpkin where you have your basic carvings, but the pumpkin skin is so thick that the light can barely get through, so you don't really have that shape that you carved out..its not really illuminated once you turn off your lights and put your light source inside the pumpkin. So what I recommend doing is going in here and really looking where you can't see through the pumpkin that well, and whenever there is, go in here with your carving tool and just shaving. Shaving through and making sure that there's a very clear light source coming through the pumpkin. Another thing to do related to this is to just take your finger...and there's going to be a lot of pumpkin debris in the light that's going to be speckled in here from you just sawing in and out...Take your finger and basically smooth out the inside. This will also be great because you are going to get a lot of loose debris which is going to come out on your finger too which the carving instrument wouldn't be able to get. So you are going to kind of do this around all the edges. Again, don't push hard; just do some free flow and switch down to your pinkie if it gets a little too tight. If you have a child helping out on this, their fingers are great because they can get into all sorts of these nooks and crannies and make sure that they are nice and smooth. That's the look we are going for because that's also going to help the light get through and shine from the inside out of the pumpkin. So you are going to want to do this on all of your carved areas. Some will be worse. Generally, the smaller the carving cut, the more likely you are going to have problems with light. Because, just it's closer quarters and it's easier for your carving instrument to kind of turn inward, which means that as you go through the pumpkin skin, the gap that you cut out is going to shrink in size from the outside to the interior of the pumpkin. So, what we are going to make sure is that light can get through and the gap remains consistent. "