One of my favorite things about living in New England (besides our autumn) is our coastlines. I have been blessed with my last few apartments being not too far from the beach.
That being said, my entire home has a beach-vibe theme going on…I prefer to call it Greek Isles themed, but it definitely has some coastal New England charm. This theme follows me through all my seasonal and holiday decor.
I decided to take advantage of the extended long weekend to carve some nautical themed pumpkins for my front porch. I was expecting the process to be a lot messier and more difficult than it was, and was happily surprised.
What you will need:
1. Craft pumpkins in a variety of sizes, depending on what you want to carve. I chose white because it fit with the theme, but there are traditional orange as well. I picked mine up at Michaels. Right now, they are on sale!
2. An X-Acto knife and blades. X-Acto 1 Precision Knife | Z-Series, Craft Knife, with Safety Cap, #11 Fine Point Blade, Easy-Change Blade System
3. A Dremel. This “pumpkin” Dremel is perfect for using on real-life pumpkins as well. (Stay tuned later this month to see how I use it on my real pumpkin). Dremel 7000-PK 6-Volt Pumpkin Carving Kit
4. Pencil, erasers, reference images, clean up materials.
The most difficult part was deciding what I wanted the pumpkins to look like, and which design would fit best on each pumpkin. After deciding, I used pencil to draw the design on the pumpkin’s face. If you have trouble drawing the image, you can print one from offline and trace it!
Next I used the X-Acto knife to cut along the pencil drawing and carve out the large portions.
I used the Dremel to carve out any curved edges and to smooth the edges down from the X-Acto knife.
Last, I used an eraser to get rid of any stray pencil marks and my pumpkins are now ready for display-yay!
Update: my only complaint is that on severely windy/stormy days the pumpkins tend to fly away off my porch since they are so light. I fixed this by adding some small rocks inside to weigh them down.
ImperfectlyPatricia 