On the outside, I try to project an image of having it all together. But underneath that, I'm kind of a disaster. Hence... the name of the site: GlossyVeneer. This year we decided to go with a vampire theme in our pumpkin carving. Vampires are so hot right now.
Okay, that’s not really why we decided to do it and there was no way in hell I was going to do a Twilight theme… but bloodsuckers still seemed like a fun theme to use.
As usual, we had grand plans this year, we were going to each carve two vampire related pumpkins and one smaller pumpkin with bats on it. But our grand plans didn’t quite work out the way we anticipated.
When we went to purchase pumpkins one week before the holiday, the grocery stores near us were all out of pumpkins. What the hell? So we went to the pumpkin patch* and spent a lot more on pumpkins than we normally would. But the pumpkins were very pretty, having not been thrown in a box on top of other pumpkins.
They had several pumpkins that had warty-looking bumps all over. That gave the pumpkins an interesting character and we purchased a few of those. Two of them were our smaller pumpkins, and one was for Kevin’s bigger carving. Little did we know those would end up to be the hardest and densest pumpkins we had ever encountered. Kevin had a brutal time cutting into the pumpkin, so the two smaller ones ended up not getting carved. I’m not crazy enough to use a hammer on a knife to get it through the pumpkin’s flesh (although my husband is crazy enough for that).
We spent hours carving the two pumpkins we each did. We watched “Hocus Pocus”, the Disney Ichabod Crane cartoon and “Shaun of the Dead” while we carved, pretty much our standard tradition now. And by this morning, about 8 hours after I had finished carving, the pumpkins were already withering away. My dracula’s eyes had started to droop and his mouth was sagging… I think he needed some botox. And we discovered that fangs are small pointy parts that are one of the quickest things to shrivel up on the pumpkin.
At least I took some photos last night before they were too far gone…
My pumpkins:
Kevin’s pumpkins:
* A pumpkin patch in Vegas is an empty lot filled with hay bales and pumpkins trucked in from Ventura, CA.
