Frankenstorm Pumpkin

Mike started it off while I cooked dinner

Hooray for owning a house  and having an excuse to carve a pumpkin!  We lived in a condo for years and kids were never allowed to go trick-or-treating around the units. They had candy in the party room I think.  There was never any point to carving a pumpkin since there was nowhere to display one.  I haven't carved a pumpkin in so many years - that's why I was really looking forward to doing it tonight.  We actually bought our pumpkin weeks ago (that's how excited we were) but had it sitting out on the porch uncarved until today.

On the weekend we chose a stencil that we liked - not too complicated for rusty pumpkin-carvers like ourselves.  I know I know, it's cheating to use a stencil but hey, we wanted it to look nice!

Tonight we were late getting home from work, and luckily the Frankenstorm wasn't upon us yet or else traffic could have been much worse.

I took over while Mike baked muffins!

Mike started on hollowing out the pumpkin while I made dinner.  Then afterwards we swapped - I transferred the stencil onto the pumpkin while he made good use of our over-ripe bananas and made his famous banana-walnut muffins.

Then we both got serious, each taking on half of the pumpkin face.  I got some use out of the wax carving tools from my jewellery classes last year, digging into the small corners of the face.

This is what Mike looks like when he concentrates

Success!

Sometimes intensity can look like confusion

My eyebrows look wild here - kind of like the pumpkin

The muffins were so distracting...

Trick or Treat!