I love the idea of carving pumpkins, but usually 0.2 seconds into the affair, I’m wishing I’d done something simpler.  I’m the kind of person who is gung-ho about a super intricate design, but is irritated when it takes me longer than 20 minutes. Last year I used my pumpkin dremel to make some character from star wars for my nephew, but he fell asleep like 10 minutes into the affair and I spent the next three hours finishing the monstrosity.

Typically, I don’t decorate pumpkins at all… I know, it’s a total blogger faux pas, but the aforementioned scenario plays through my mind, then I just set whole pumpkins around and call it done.

This year, however, I got to looking at one of my pinhole Moroccan style lanterns and thoughts of easy pumpkin carving ideas swirled through my head.  I thought I’d try my hand at creating a design similar to my pinhole lanterns because potentially, I could just use my power drill and make it easy on myself. And sure enough it worked out pretty well. 

Materials:

• Pumpkins
• Serrated Knife
• Mechanical Pencil
• Ruler
• Drill with 1/4″ bit

I’m never quite sure why people cut the tops of the pumpkins off.  I like cutting the bottom out – the throwing the bottom piece away and just setting the whole pumpkin over top of a candle like a cloche.  Regardless of your personal cutting beliefs, go ahead and cut the bottom (or top) of your pumpkin, the scoop out the seeds.  Keep those seeds and use them in my roasted pumpkin seed recipes!!

For the smaller design, I simply drilled a line around the pumpkins and then made some additional holes above and below the line… If you take a close look at the picture, you’ll get the picture… haha. For the larger design, I started by drilling 5 holes.  4 in a sideways square (or diamond) shape.  Then one hole in the center of the square.

I then used a mechanical pencil (without lead) to etch a little swooping line between the holes.  This is the line I then followed with the drill.

After you get the border of the shape drilled, fill it in with lots of holes and you’re done!

I love how they turned out and even through it’s very difficult to see the light peeking through during the daytime hours, they look so pretty and sparkly at night on the porch!

I hope you’ll give it a try, after all, these are pretty enough (and not halloween-y) so you can leave them out way past this weekend!

Have a great one out there today!