Something Kirby This Way Comes

List item: Carve a cool pumpkin
Status: Completed

Okay, so I know publishing a post on Christmas Eve about carving a Halloween pumpkin is a little unorthadox but that is just what comes from taking a month’s break for NaNoWriMo and generally just working a little bit ahead.

Complete honesty: I am writing this about a month after the fact and this pumpkin has long since rotted, in fact I only had three days of Kirby goodness until it collapsed in on itself and I had to throw it out.

So firstly I got a reasonably sized pumpkin and created a template of Kirby to be carved into it. I know we could have gone for something more traditional (especially since it has been around 15 years since I last carved a pumpkin) but, in the words of Cate Blanchett, “if you know you are going to fail, then fail gloriously”. I figured this would not turn out well but at least I tried.

I got my partner to hollow out the pumpkin whilst I made sure dinner was on, in retrospect I should have saved the seeds for a snack or something. In fact, the whole pumpkin going to waste (other than providing 3 days of decoration) feels just a little bit decadent.

We took it in turns to do the whole carving out of pieces and at this point it was already starting to look like Kirby, the thing is that with the light behind it… it was a bit hard to make out some bits, so I did something I had never done before: partial carving.

I may have wrestled the knife from my partner’s hands, (I felt bad about this since this was his first pumpkin carve),but I couldn’t get two and I really wanted this one to work… and if it didn’t it would be my fault. So I did the shaving/partial carving. I went a bit over the top and accidentally did the waving arm at the top when I wasn’t meant to, but actually I think it made it look a lot more recognisably Kirby than just an amorphous pumpkin blob.

I know he’s a little rough around the edges but we were only armed with a £3 pumpkin carving set from Morrison’s so I am so very happy with how this turned out. I would never have thought of doing the partial carving to get shade differences, but think that made all the difference in capturing Kirby’s arm, feet and cheeks.