Carved and Colored Creations

For Family Home Evening activities towards the end of October, we decorated pumpkins. The younger 3 boys wanted to paint mini pumpkins, so we did that on Monday night the 19th. I pulled out all my craft paint and paintbrushes, covered the table in newspaper, and we got to work painting. Jonah, Micah, and I each painted two, and Kanyon painted a little gourd as well, so his total was 3. 

Back Row L-R: Kanyon's horizontal-striped gourd, Kanyon's vertical-striped pumpkin,
Micah's scary face, my clown, and Jonah's scary face. 

Kanyon and I both painted Mardi Gras colors on our wee-be-littles

Jonah and Micah both painted black and white on their wee-be-littles

The next Monday night, October 26th, was our designated pumpkin-carving night. Our schedule was hectic that evening, though. Ammon had XC practice right after school, so I brought the other 3 boys home from school, made dinner, and we ate dinner. Then I had to go back into town to do some errands and have Salmon Idol practice. Josh and Ammon got home from after 6:00, ate dinner, and then Josh set up the table with newspapers, bowls, knives, and got all the carving supplies out. Everyone had set aside their pumpkins weeks before, and they took their pumpkins to the table and got to work cutting and gutting! I got back home about 8:00 that night, and was so happy that Josh had gotten everything ready to start them on the carving project without me, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to get it all done in time for bed.

This has become a really enjoyable activity to do since our boys are getting older. The boys completely gutted out, designed, and carved all their own pumpkins without hardly any help. The only thing I had to do to help this year was print out the design for Kanyon that he'd wanted. Everyone completed the carving much faster than I'd anticipated, too...except for Micah who picked an intricate design, and it had so many small holes in the design of its mouth that it was very time-consuming to carve. So half-way through carving his, he decided to stop (which is why the mouth is so small--he only did the top half of it).

On the top row, Kanyon's was the skull with bones, Ammon did the smiling Jack-o-Lantern, and Jonah carved the scary face. On the bottom row, Josh made the Jack-o-Lantern with toothpicks for teeth, I made the Frankenstein (since the whole pumpkin was still green except for the front that I carved), and Micah carved the spooky face with small pointy teeth.

We used some strobe lights to light them up on the night we carved them, and it was fun for all of us to see the freshly-carved pumpkins light up that way. We'd never done that before, but we all liked watching them with the flashing lights. It felt as exciting as watching a newly-decorated Christmas tree! I took a little video of the fun effect as well: