The week of Halloween we spent most evenings carving them. By Halloween we had not even carved them all. Some of them, as you have seen, became our Christmas tree.
My favorite was the small pumpkin I carved as a cat face:
You can see the rest of the Pumpkin pictures by clicking here.
Steph's camera, it turns out, handles the low light bright thing far better than mine. The blurry ones are from my camera, poor shutter speed or some such.
Some of the pumpkins were kept inside when carved, but most went onto the porch.
As you may know, I own more glow sticks than most people.
Glow sticks were safer and less of a hassle than candles. They worked well enough for the porch pumpkins that we could put in the back shadowy area. Additionally, most of the carved pumpkins that we kept inside were placed around the bedroom with glowsticks. I especially enjoyed the red and the blue, though I do not believe there are any pictures of that.
Many of the Pumpkins we had carved and left around the livingroom and kitchen were lit with candles. It's a nice glow and I like the look very much. But when it comes to sleeping, or putting outside in the wind there's a lot to be said for glowsticks. Plus the colors are so much fun.
We allowed our neighbors to take some of the pumpkins we brought home, there is one picture of 2 pumpkins in a hall way. Those were carved by our immediate neighbor Merrill.
It turned out to be fairly time intensive, and I was actually working a lot then. In spite of how much time it took I would say it was very worth it. By the end it was sort of an imagination drain trying to think up different faces. But I'd do it again in a heart beat. I hope to do it again this year.
That's really about all we did for Halloween. No party or adventure or anything really. Mostly though, it was enough.
And just this week (mid January) we've been throwing out a few uncarved pumpkins that are reaching the end of their non-mushy lives. Still a few left holding up though.
-Mr. Nivose
Mrs. Nivose says: We got the pumpkins from ARDEC. Some were the ones Kris (the lab manager) and I planted in early June and others were volunteer pumpkins from seeds left from the previous year's pumpkins. The pumpkins get planted to be used in mold studies on dry beans. Once the pumpkins are ready Kris bores a hole in them and adds a half cup or so of moldy birdseed which she had prepared earlier in the year. Once the seed has been added to the pumpkins, she spreads them around the bean field. As the pumpkins decompose, the mold works its way into the dirt. Now the field will already have mold in it and we can plant different varieties of beans and find out which are resistant to the mold. There were way more pumpkins than she needed so Peter and I took a bunch home- many, many more than I expected. We gave a couple to some of the neighbors, carved most of the rest, and the few that weren't carved ended up as our pumpkin tree.
We spent about 3 evenings carving the pumpkins and listened to some detective stories while we carved the pumpkins. I don't remember who wrote them, but some were better than others. Peter had lots of good ideas for the pumpkins he carved and I kept kept getting stuck for ideas. We lit them with glow sticks, but because it was cold outside, the glowsticks weren't as bright outside as they were inside. Some were very small and others were quite large. The small ones were very cute. It's very hard to make a scary carving, but cute ones are not so hard to do. We had them spread all over our apartment for a few days, then gradually took them outside as they broke down. Eventually we had to throw them away.
On Halloween night we lit some of the indoor pumpkins with candles, turned off the lights and took pictures. These are just a few of them, and one is actually a ceramic candle holder.
It was pretty fun carving all the pumpkins and seeing them everytime we came and went from home. I don't know if Kris is planning to plant more pumpkins this year, but I hope so!
-Mrs. Nivose
1 comment:
I certainly hope that you made lots of pumpkin pie when you were finished!
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