Happy Halloween Everyone! I'm lovin' life today! I dressed up even though I had no where interesting to go, rockin' my new pumpkin print dress and my custom vampire fangs. I've had my Halloween playlist going all day and have caught up with American Horror Story. I've carved my Jack-O-Lantern and I have my night of spooky movies planned. First up, The Devils Rejects, my favourite horror movie. I'd love to hear all about how you've spent Halloween. So, this is the last of my Blogtober Challenge posts and I've really enjoyed writing them all. It has been pretty hard to keep up with blogging everyday, especially since I've been ill with flu-like symptoms basically throughout the entirety of October, so I'm feeing a little proud of myself. Well done to all of my fellow bloggers who've been posting for Blogtober too!
Since I haven't really done much to blog about today, I thought I'd just share some photographs of my pumpkin carving process because I know that not everyone carves pumpkins or knows how to create a Jack-O-Lantern and so I wanted explain how to do it :)
I'm so glad that my mum managed to find me a pumpkin last minute today! With all the preparations for my friend's Halloween party at the weekend, I completely forgot to get one. She avoided the supermarkets because they have usually sold out on the day, and went to my hometown's little market to the fruit & veg stall. My pumpkin was only 60p! To carve your pumpkin you will need a good knife and something to scoop out all of the inside of the vegetable. Unless you're like me and love getting stuck in and messy! I use my hands :) You can pick up these cute little pumpkin carving kits in October that include a carving knife that's safe for kids and clumsy people like me, a scoop and a little tool to help you draw on whatever design you want onto your pumpkin. Tip: put a bag down on the surface you'll be preparing your Jack-O-Lantern on because of all the mess.
First you want to 'draw' your design onto the pumpkin, by draw I mean etch/engrave your design so that you have an outline to work with. I always go for a spoopy Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas, because it just looks adorable and it's a nice simple design. You also need to draw a circle around the top of your pumpkin to cut out your lid. I forgot to get a photograph of this stage, oops. Start by cutting this circle out of the top of your pumpkin, and then you can pull the contents out of your pumpkin, all of the seeds and orange stringy mush. It's really fun!
As you can see above, I also decided to cut out the eyes of my design, too. I did this so I could use them to hold onto the pumpkin. After you've emptied your pumpkin, making sure you get the inside of your Jack-O-Lantern as smooth as you can so that there's no hangy bits that can get burnt when you put candles inside later. You'll need to neaten the underside of the lid you cut out earlier, cutting off any of the stingy flesh of the pumpkin. Do this careful because if you change the shape of the lid, it wont fit back on top of your pumpkin.
Now it's time to carve your design into the pumpkin. Just cut around your outline like you did with the lid. When you are done, you have yourself a Jack-O-Lantern! Just add candles and its ready to display.
How cute is my pumpkin!? He's now in our living room window :) Did you carve a pumpkin this year? What design did you do? I'm the only one in my house who makes a Jack-O-Lantern every year, haha. I'd decorate the whole house too if they'd let me!
I thought I'd share a few more photographs of my day, of my Halloween outfit and some photographs I took on my walk to the shop to get myself some snacks ready to watch movies. Our local pub is really enthusiastic about Halloween and have such fabulous decorations every year. I snapped a few photographs when I was walking by. This year's theme was a horror carnival, with scary clowns too of course!
I hope you've all enjoyed my Halloween ramblings! I hope you've all had a wonderful Halloween weekend & day. Also, Blessed Samhain to my fellow pagans! I hope you've liked my Blogtober posts as much as I have sharing them with you all. I wanted to finish Blogtober Day 31 with a roundtop of my favourite posts of the month. Enjoy!
Thanks for reading!
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Why do you love or hate Halloween?
What's your favourite or least favourite thing about this holiday?
Lovely post! I've never carved a pumpkin but I always think it looks like a lot of fun! It looks like you had a fab halloween night -we didn't do much, stayed at home but we did get some sweets in for trick or treaters but in the end, there were only about 5 of them knocked on the door!
ReplyDeleteThankyou lovely. Really? You should definitely get yourself a pumpkin next year & give it a go. It is very fun :) Sounds lovely though, cosy night in's are the best. Haha same happened to us this year, we had 6 x
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