Pumpkin Carving

Hello everyone!It's that time of year where we all get into the autumnal spirit and embrace the halloween festivities. One of things I had never done before was carve pumpkins which is crazy as I had never realised how extremely popular it is to do and noticed it was everywhere, so it's safe to say I was completely late to that party. I ventured to Asda and got some for us to try out together and we stuck on some Youtube tutorials to get an idea of what we needed to do. I realised that it is not as daunting and difficult as I had originally thought and it ended up being a really fun activity to do. I thought I would share with you a little step by step guide of what we did. Enjoy!
Things you will need:* Pumpkin* Small sharp knife* Large spoon* Large bowl* Pencil* Candles* Matches
Step 1First things first, use your small knife to cut a circle around the top of the pumpkin. It doesn't have to be a perfect circle. This is to open up the pumpkin to then scoop out the contents of the pumpkin and to use later as a lid to open up and place the candles in.Step 2Remove the lid of the pumpkin and using a large spoon, scoop out all the contents of the pumpkin, removing all the seeds and goop and place them into a large bowl.Step 3Next grab a pencil and begin drawing the design onto your pumpkin. You can also use tracing paper with images and patterns on if you prefer and pin them to your pumpkin, there is a huge variety online to choose from. But for this tutorial I simply took this image I saw online and began replicating something similar onto my pumpkin.Image taken from GoogleStep 3Now for the exciting part! Carefully using a small sharp knife, begin cutting into the pumpkin and carving out the shapes. I admit once you get into the swing of things, it's really easy to do. I decided to stick to large simple shapes to cut out as it being my first attempt of carving any pumpkin.
Ta da!Step 4Finally remove the lid of the pumpkin. Then grab your candles and a box of matches and light the candles. There is two ways to do it, either put the candles inside and light them, although this may cause the match to catch your fingers, or light the candles outside the pumpkin and if there is a big enough gap, put them in the pumpkin via the mouth of it. Once they are placed inside, place the lid back on and turn off the lights to see your results!
Let me know if you have carved any pumpkins before and what designs you did, I'd love to hear about them :) Thanks for reading!