The purrrrrfect pumpkin!

Whilst I was sitting around waiting for Violet to finish her dance class on Saturday, I got talking to another mum about the subject of Halloween.  I told the other mum that I'd seen pumpkins for sale in Sainsbury's for only £1.50 and was going to try my hand at pumpkin carving.  I mentioned that I didn't want to carve anything scary as I didn't want to upset Violet, but  I remembered looking at images of some amazing pumpkin carvings on the internet last year - not only faces, but cartoon characters and some had been carved beautifully in lattice work, which looked stunning. 

It seemed that I'd thrown down the 'pumpkin carving' gauntlet, as that evening I received a text message to say that the other mother had bought a pumpkin and had set her husband to work on it.  Apparently she'd been inspired by my idea of googling the internet and now her husband was busily carving an image of Minnie Mouse into theirs.

The pressure was on - what was I going to carve in to mine?

So on Sunday evening I sat down and trawled through loads of images on the internet for a little bit of inspiration.  As you'd expect there were lots of witches and scary faces, but I finally decided that due to Violet's love of all things Shrek related, I'd try and carve the image of Puss in Boots. I found the image on www.bandofcats.com, who were offering some free PDF stencils. 

I did manage to print the image, but it was too large for my baby pumpkin.  I struggled, without success, to reduce it's size, but my laptop was having none of it, so in the end I had to draw the entire image freehand.

It wasn't purrrfect(!), but it'd have to do.

After removing the pumpkin's brains, it was time to start carving.

Taking care not to slice one of my fingers off.

The carving all finished.

I just need to add a candle in the back

Ta da!!!!

It's amazing the things you can achieve with a pencil, a vegetable knife and a potato peeler.

I'm so chuffed with myself.

Me likey mucho!

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