Pumpkin Carving 101

Audra Lowe: Halloween is right there on the corner and you know what that means picking, carving and decorating that pumpkin and having fun with lifestyle expert Evette Rios is here. She’s got a little carving 101 and I really need this lesson because Evette, I’m serious I used to go to the pumpkin pot. I’ll pick it and somebody else can do the work. I’m just not that creative with it.

Evette Rios: Oh, stop it.

Audra Lowe: Take it easy. You say it’s easy but look at all these tools. So we’re going to work it out, all right.

Evette Rios: Okay so the first thing is you want to pick a pumpkin. So you know there’s all different sizes, there’s some with bumps, there’s some without bumps. You want to make sure if you want your pumpkin to survive through the holiday you want to make sure the stem is nicely attached. So you want to try to pick it up from the stem and if it goes with the stem then that’ a good sign.

Audra Lowe: Yeah, if it separates and drops on your food, don’t take it.

Evette Rios: Exactly. No don’t take it, it’s an older pumpkin, it’s probably we’re going to just degrade a little faster.

Audra Lowe: What about color? Does that matter?

Evette Rios: You know color it will kind of inspire you some, there’s this white pumpkins that are called luminaries that are so beautiful and those you want to make a ghost or something else that’s kind of --

Audra Lowe: But as far as picking it as concerned, it doesn’t have to be darker are better, or lighter better.

Evette Rios: No, the greener I mean they will have a little bit more green here towards the stem when they’re newer but at this time, if you are most of them are going to be pretty orange.

Audra Lowe: Okay now we’re preparing the pumpkin for the festivities. What’s the first thing that you do? What do you have going on?

Evette Rios: Well these are the tools that I like to use. There are some expensive pumpkin carving tools that you can buy. They tend to be plastic. They tend to break so I like to use this. This is actually, I stole this from my dad’s tool box.

Audra Lowe: Sorry dad, so who’s next.

Evette Rios: Yeah exactly but this is a dry wall knife and actually this I find to be the best tool for carving a pumpkin and then for edging pumpkins which is a whole other thing which I’m going to show you, you need this little woodcarving tools. You could pick this up at any craft store. I bought this for less than a dollar for the pack.

Then for scooping it out this is where the kids can really get involved, skipping out, just get your eyes from scooper, there’s nothing better for scooping out the inside.

Audra Lowe: Okay so let’s go fun. I’m ready to play.

Evette Rios: Yeah, you're ready to play.

Audra Lowe: All ready to play so how do you start off with this.

Evette Rios: Yes, so the first thing I want to do is I want actually cut out the bottom and rather than -- well, I think this works out really well because you can take this out. You can throw it away and then instead of putting the candle inside of a surface that’s kind of wobbly you actually put the candle on the floor or on the table and then put this over. It’s a little bit safer so you don’t have to worry about the kids getting burned and then say that.

Once you’ve cleaned it out and you cut the bottom then there all sorts of stencils. I actually made this one I took some clip art and I just put it right on the --

Audra Lowe: You hold this up so that they can see really quickly to see, there we go.

Evette Rios: Yeah, so that one is --

Audra Lowe: So this is what you did yourself.

Evette Rios: Yeah you do it yourself until you just kind of stick it on with some tape whatever tape you happen to have and if you need to cut it to kind of go around the pumpkin you can sort of create little slits here so it carves or --

Audra Lowe: This is an awkward surface.

Evette Rios: It is a little bit awkward, yeah. So you're just going to stick it on like that and then what you do is with your tools, your handy dandy tools, you just kind of pop little holes, actually this is a better way. You just follow your design and just kind of pop little holes around the edges so you can when you take this off you’ll see the holes and you know where to cut.

So fast forward the very end of this I want to show to everyone how this looks. Okay, I’ve cut this already so now I’m just going to kind of pull it out. So I’m just going to cut through and just pop it through the pumpkin so I’ve already precut these holes.

Audra Lowe: So does this take a long time of doing that?

Evette Rios: You know no actually yesterday I was like watching TV and doing this. It’s really easy. This pumpkin took me maybe 20 minutes to do, 25 minutes just once you’ve got your design transferred on, it’s all super easy.

Audra Lowe: Okay Vaseline to preserve, that was it.

Evette Rios: Vaseline or olive oil

Audra Lowe: Thank you very much. Good to have you back we’ll be back in just a minute.