The Tab Tries: Pumpkin Carving

The Halloween festivities are upon us and with it comes arts and crafts involving vegetables. The pressure for this Tab Tries was on.

Completely clueless, we turned to the saviour that is Wiki How.

Shocked at the lack of pumpkin patches in Lenton, we ventured to the next best place top quality pumpkins could be acquired… the Co-op. To our delight, pumpkins here were a mere 2 for £5 – and made excellent boobs. This was definitely going to be a resounding win.

Busty – bit  of a seedy joke

Pumped (har har) after our trip to the supermarket, we raided the cupboards for promising-looking carving tools. I grabbed the pizza cutter in a wild moment of naïve optimism while Simon selected a particularly sturdy corkscrew along with the potato peeler. You know, just in case.

Pumpkin surgery equipment.

Feeling cocky now that we had actually touched a real-life pumpkin – or in Simon’s case, ‘juicy doubles’ – we Googled ‘Epic carved pumpkins’.

Nice one, StudentBeans.

Hmmm, perhaps a little ambitious.

Anxious, we went on the hunt for a small scale pumpkin to practise on. Acknowledging there wasn’t quite enough time to genetically engineer one, we opted for a satsuma.

Meet Terry – our guinea pig of a miniature pumpkin.

Not conjunctivitis, just poor handiwork.

Finally we felt ready to bring out the big guns. Putting on our game faces,we whipped out some fancy Sharpies, drew on our chosen designs and got stuck in.

Mixed emotions.

There was some initial bewilderment in how far down the hollow centre is.

“Is it in yet?” may have been thrown about a little bit.

Cheeky UKIP propaganda to fire us up.

There was something oddly therapeutic in scooping out all the slimy orange crap inside; said crap was placed in a bowl to be used later on (watch this space!)

Only for the brave: the classic overarm carving technique.

Once we’d established our preferred carving instruments, we soon learned to wield them with alarming precision.

“You might feel a small prick.”

…Slowly, my pumpkin started to look more and more like it had it consumed a particularly dodgy kebab. Having purchased many a less than kosher Shish in my time I was sympathetic.

In his defence, bats are hard.

After hours of grappling with knives to cut in a curved fashion, our babies were at last fully sculpted. Admittedly, we came within millimetres of a trip to the QMC.

Matches and tea lights sourced, we hit the lights and behold…

It’s safe to say that we were pretty chuffed with our creations. But we did cheat a tiny bit; you see that pumpkin chunder? It may look like it’s flowing magically in a river of glorious seedy sick, but really it’s held up with a spare bit of pumpkin.

Sorry to shatter your illusions there.

Adoring parents.

Quick fixes aside, we were finally the proud parents of two rather odd carved children and, like a pair of soppy schoolgirls, we gazed into the soft open flame…

Wait – I mean we slayed zombies and did badass Halloween shit. Yeah.