Carving Pumpkins With Cookie Cutters.

     Since Halloween is coming up in a few weeks I thought that I would make my first craft subject be about carving pumpkins. I found this on pinterest.com which lead me to a site called Fresh Home Ideas. This site showed a step by step approach on using cookie cutters to carve pumpkins with.

 The original site used:

1 Rubber mallet

a cookie cutter of your choice

Needle -nose Pliers

pumpkin carving kit

What I used:

a regular hammer (Since I don't have a rubber mallet lying around)

I used some cheap cookie cutters that I bought at Wal-Mart ( used a maple leaf)

wire cutters (because I could not find my needle-nose pliers)

 small kitchen knife

So that I could cut out the top I used:

 a dry erase marker

a normal steak knife

And of course for those that don't know to scoop out the guts:

A large spoon and a bowl for the pumpkin guts

 For the Beginner Pumpkin Carvers 

(If your not a beginner skip down to the Here's the cookie cutter part)

For any pumpkin carving that I do I always have something under the pumpkin in case I make a mess. In the pic I cut up a brown paper bag from the grocery store. You can use trash bags news paper or whatever you want. First step is to cut off the top and to scoop out the seeds. That way if I need to have a better grip on the pumpkin I can grab it at the top. This is also so you can have the light shine through from the light you are going to put inside the pumpkin. If you want a lid to the pumpkin that wont fall in as the pumpkin ages the longer it sits out insert the knife at an angle so that it creates a a kind of shelf for the lid to sit on. I was not able to actually accomplish this for this walk through but I promise it works I've done it before.  I like to create a key on the lid. Its where there is a square piece of the pumpkin is cut out along with the lid so I know where the back of the pumpkin is. This way I don't have to stand there and twist the lid on till it fits. 

 Use Dry erase marker to make a circle with the "key" on the back of the pumpkin. Follow the outline to cut off the lid. A sharpie works great here to if you don't want your lines to wipe off.

Scoop out the insides after taking off the lid that you just cut off. If you want to bake the seeds put them in the bowl. If you don't then just put them in the trash.

Here's The Cookie Cutter!!!

   Take the hammer/ rubber mallet and tap the cookie cutter into the pumpkin. Be careful I ended up bending my cutter making it hard to keep its shape when I was done.

I tapped the cutter on all sides in a circle till the cutter was all the way in except for enough to have an edge to pull it out with the pliers(wire cutters) 

Instead of removing the cookie cutter right away( like they did in the original site) I left it in and used the small kitchen knife to cut out the pumpkin that is on the inside of the cutter. This way I was able to make sure that I kept the shape of the cut out all the way through to the other side. 

*This is probably where I should have gave in and bought a carving kit. I didn't buy one in the beginning because I was hoping to make this an alternative to having to buy a pumpkin carving kit every year. While it worked, it would have probably been easier if I had just given in and gotten the kit.*

     After making sure that you carved out the excess pumpkin for the shape you can take the cutter out with the pliers(wire cutters) here.  Repeat this step as many times as you want. If the cutter gets too bent out of shape you can always re bend it by inserting it into the first hole that you created on the pumpkin. Then just bend it into the shape of the hole and its back to its shape.

Of course you will have to clean out the insides again from all of the carving that you did.

In then end just take a candle( or a dome light like I did) and insert it into the pumpkin and put the lid on. Yay! your done! This took me about 2 hours to do all of this. Of course I was stopping taking notes, taking pics, and having to reshape the cookie cutter that I had. 

Here is the original Site that I got the instructions from!

http://www.freshhomeideas.com/entertaining---parties/halloween/halloween-decorations/carve-pumpkins-with-cookie-cutters