The Five Day, Five Pumpkin Challenge

Ever since I carved my first “3D” pumpkin 5 years ago, I’ve been pretty addicted to the art of pumpkin carving. Year after year, I try to challenge myself to make something better than the last and this year, I was definitely put to the test. First I have to rewind to 9 months ago, when I was contacted to see if I would consider taking on a pumpkin commission. I was shocked, flattered, and intrigued. The request was to make five pumpkins for an event, which conveniently happened to also be in my area. And this was not just any event. These pumpkins were going to be used as centerpieces for someone’s wedding! This meant that I would not only have to carve pumpkins every day for 5-6 days straight to keep them fresh, have to figure out how and where to store five huge pumpkins, but also have the pressure of not messing up! Well, I decided to take on the challenge and spent all of last week being a slave to carving. It was actually not as stressful and chaotic as I thought it would be and I’m so glad I did it. Dropping them off for the wedding was actually a bit sad, but at least I had the comfort of knowing guests would enjoy them.  And of course I took a bunch of photos before leaving my babies behind, so enjoy!

Lord Voldemort “in the flesh”. You can get the template I used here.

Hunger Games logo – for this pumpkin, I used the logo as a stencil and freehanded the rest of the details.

Twilight (Bella and Edward) – I used this stencil to start off with and then added a lot more details to Bella’s hair.

Storing them was a bit of a challenge and we pretty much had to eat out all week. :D

Yoda was definitely the most challenging, but with a lot of good reference pics, hopefully I captured his essence. “Carve me, you will!”

And lastly, I had some fun with this zombie pumpkin. Somehow my zombie pumpkins always come out a little more on the comical side, but I still had fun deciding which parts of his face to mutilate. Some people have said this one looks like the Toxic Avenger, the zombie from Plants vs. Zombies, or even Cornelius Evazan from the classic cantina scene in A New Hope. What do you think?