This Years Pumpkins

Ok so, the kid is getting to be as good as I am at carving. Yep, she carved all of those up above. Didn't take her long either! I however only did two and they are as follows. Take a wild guess at which one took me ten hours from start to finish!?! 

The witch you say? Well for that I'll laugh at you, just as you're laughing that I would waste 10 valuable hours on one pumpkin. Yes, The Green Man is the one that took me 10 whole bloody hours! I had some other templates I had wanted to do, but damn having spent so much time on one carving took all my interest in doing detailing out of me for the year. To be fair the 3 I showed you from last years carvings each took me longer, but that's because I designed the templates and I count that into the time spent as well. These I just took some templates from the net that I had found and went with them. So the time spent includes everything from hollowing out of the pumpkin all the way through the transfering of the pattern to the peeling and then the deep cutting. No, not one of my carvings (or Becca's) are all the way through the gourd, they are all just peeling areas and cutting different depths for brightness. 

To preserve our pumpkins so they last a little longer than normal, after carving we wash them with a bleach solution to kill off bacteria. Even our scalpels and knives are sterilized before we start. Then, once washed and patted dry, we coat them inside and out with vaseline so they don't dry out and end up "peeling" back in the carved areas, enlarging cuts that shouldn't be enlarged any further.  Another tip for future carving success is to never open the pumpkin at the top. If you look at the witch with the cauldron, you'll see a glow at the bottom of it. That's where I opened them up and hollowed them out from. The reason for this is simple, when you light up a pumpkin you heat it, that heat causes moisture to evaporate out of the pumpkin. What happens when water evaporates you ask, well it goes up into the atmosphere. If there are no cuts through the pumpkin at the top, the moisture has no place to go other than to run back down the inside getting reaborbed into the meat of the pumpkin, thereby helping it to last longer and not dry out so quickly.

Now that you know my carving secrets I hope to see you put them to use next year and show me your carvings!

Cheers, and I hope you all had a safe and wonderful night!

Coming Soon To A Blog Near You

 Well now that Halloweens over I'm not spending all my time carving pumpkins and decorating for Halloween. I still have to take some pictures of the pumpkins that Becca and I carved, but they will be posted up here soon. I hope you all had a safe and fun night!

Pumpkins, Templates and Photos

Well, those are the pumpkins of my kids that I carved last year, I suppose all that you need now is to see the pictures that I used to create the templates and if I can find them, the templates themselves. That however, could be quite difficult as they're on my computer which isn't working at the moment ergh! The pictures will be easy to find and add here, I have them saved to disk, it's just the templates that are a problem. If I'm lucky I may just find them in an e-mail that I had sent off to Kat shortly after carving the pumpkins originally! Keep your fingers crossed Ladies and Germs, the game is now afoot! ;)

Well unfortunately I can't find the templates, like I said, I know where they are on my computer, but that doesn't do me any good here. BUT I do have the actual pictures that I used, without further adu, I present the original school photos of my kidlets!

Now I suppose, all you need to do is look from the  carved pumpkin and back to the pic and decide for yourselves  what kind of a job I did. I must admit,  pumpkin carving is one of my favorite obsessions...lol.

Just Another Award! :D Updated!!!!

Well well well, it seems that the Cat Lady from How to Become A Cat Lady...Without The Cats has deemed it appropriate to pass on an award to me. Guess that means that I'll have to go by the rules and find 5 more people to pass it on to from here. Not only that, but I need to find 5 things that I am obsessive about apparently! That's going to be tough, but hey, I'm always up for a challenge ;)

Thankfully those are the only conditions to this award so here I sit at the library trying to come up with 5 things that I obsess over. Like I said, not easy to do, but I'll try!

I suppose that first off I obsess over books, I love to read and spend a good deal of time doing so. For that matter you should see my spare bedroom! I've turned it into a library and must have close to 5oo books in there (if you count all the Condensed Reader's Digest novels). Aside from the books written in German and some of the history books along with the set of Encyclopedia's I think I've read them all. Seeing as I can't read nor understand any language other than English, chances are pretty good I'll never read the German books!

If reading is my first obsession, then playing Sudoku and Jigoku have to be my second. I don't know if you've heard of those puzzles (probably have), but I find them a great deal of fun. In fact, I enjoy Sudoku so much that I've bought the board game and play against my kid on a regular basis! For those not in the know, Jigoku is much like Sudoku and is played the same way only you don't get any numbers to start off with. All you get are greater and less than symbols and it can be a great challenge!

Hmmm, I guess by going by my own blog, my third obsession has to be gardening! If you don't believe me on that one, just go through my blog and look at all my posts about my flower beds...lol.

Fourthly, I'll choose my kids as one of my obsessions. Yeah I spoil the one that lives with me horribly and the other two, well lets just say that they lack for nothing! I do love the "little" darling's to death, even when I could gladly strangle them for their pms-ing and fighting, but I think that's every mother's perogitive, isn't it?

Oh boy, now for my fifth obsession, what on earth could that one be!?! Oh, I know, how about being creative? Either here in my blog, in comments to others or when drawing, playing with clay or carving pumpkins! Yep, that's a good obsession to admit to! In all of these options for this particular obsession blogging and pumpkin carving have got to be at the top of the list. I do believe that I will do a post showing you pictures of both my kids and the pumpkinds that I turned them into last year. I think that will best explain and give example to my obsession. I find it incredibly satisfying to find a picture that I like and first turn it into a template and then go further and turn that template into a pumpkin carving. When it works, it sure is Wonderful!!!!

Now for my 5 recipients of this award, who shall they be, who shall they be? Well, this is something I'll have to think about, but for now I'm almost out of time here at the library! So I will give this post an update the next time I manage to get around here! I'm only allowed 1 hour/day and the library is closed on Sunday's and Monday's, not only that but it will be a few more days before I get another day off work so you may just need to wait a week before I have a chance to update this post! My most humble of appologies on that!

Ok, it's now Thursday morning and I do believe that I've got my updates ready! Yay me...lol! Sorry for the long wait, but today is my day off and I've comandeered Silv's computer while he sleeps :D 

Now the much anticipated 5 recipients, in no particular order:

Nanodance from Callithump Thunderblog!

And then there's Probablydontlikeyou from I Probably Don't Like You, but don't take it seriously.

We can't forget about Mango Girl now can we? Nope, not even a little bit, so here's the link to her of at Ramblings from Mango Girl!

Poppy from Poppy's Dream Fields always has something of interest to read as well. Between her and her mom Minka over at Stirring My Thoughts, I'm actually learning a bit about Europe :)

Congratulations all of you, I can't wait to find out what your obsessions are!