Slice and dice: Professional carver offers tips for creating festive pumpkins

Good pumpkins carvers remember they are not in a slasher movie.

"As long as you plan ahead of time, any pumpkin you carve can look good," Jack-o'-lantern aficionado Linnae Cumnock said this past week at Spirit Halloween where she was demonstrating basic pumpkin carving techniques.
She had already put a moon and bat on one gourd — "That probably took about an hour," she said — and was finishing a haunted house scene on another — "That one's still got goo in it," she confessed — before starting a simple, smiling face.

A lanky figure loomed near Cumnock, watching.

"I'm the pumpkin carver's daughter," 13-year-old Samantha explained her presence.

It was proper the teen would materialize at the carving site. Making Jack-o'-lanterns is family fun, and the girl with the "Bewitched" name has grown up creating Halloween memories with her mom and brother, Matthew, 8. (The youngest Cumnock attended Wednesday's demonstration in spirit only.)

"We've carved a lot of them," said Mom, who grew up cutting patterns into pumpkins with her dad, Thomas Pospychala. "I always carved pumpkins as a kid, and I just never stopped."

That statement should allay any frights a pumpkin salesman like Buzz Barton of Uvalde might have. Barton said it's been a scary year for the orange crop, thanks to "water issues" in New Mexico where pumpkins are grown for Barton's employer, Cargil Farms Produce.

The South Texas wholesaler moves 50 or 60 truck loads a year, with most of those 36,000-pound shipments hitting the highways right now.

"There's a lot of people using them as decoration," Barton said. "And there's still a lot of people who like to carve pumpkins. We certainly do. Our children do it with our grandchildren."

He was pleased to hear his product was being carved up at a temporary Halloween supply store on West Loop 281.

"It's a national tradition," he said, though not specifically referring to pumpkin carving on Loop 281. "It's been going on a lot of years. It's fun to see the pumpkins out at the churches, the pumpkin patches where they are making a little money for the kids."

Cumnock was producing traditional Jack-o'-lanterns Wednesday.

"The best part of fall is the pumpkins," she said after sloshing the guts out of her subject.

She then taped her smiling pattern to the pumpkin, making small rips at its edge to tuck in so the paper would conform to the round surface.

Whipping out one of a handful of plastic tools designed for the job, she dotted the outline of her pattern with tiny holes.

"You just put little indentations in the pumpkin," she said. "If you poke it all the way through, it will leave little marks on the line (when it's cut)."

Removing the paper form, she produced a tiny sawtooth blade, perhaps the only metal tool in her shed. Cumnock had some advice as she followed the dotted line.

"If you mess up, you can do cover-up on it where you carve around where you messed up," she said, while not messing up her line.

She did mess up, earlier, making the jack-o'-lantern with the haunted house scene.

"I just carved it so (the mistake) looks like it's supposed to be part of the tree," she said. "If you cut something wrong, or you cut in the wrong direction, I've always turned it into something else."

She would stop sawing every now and then to remove a small piece from the shell, rather than punch out the entire mouth at once and risk breakage.

In about 10 minutes, the New Mexican pumpkin was a cheerful jack-o'-lantern, grinning from Hawaii to Ethiopia.

The pumpkin carver was pleased, and so was the pumpkin carver's daughter. There's more than a ghost of a chance Samantha will one day teach the same craft to her own little witches and wizards.

"Hopefully, because I like kids," the teen said. "And Halloween is one of my favorite holidays."

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Pumpkin carving tips

- Carve in sections, removing chucks as you go

- Use masking tape to affix pattern to pumpkin rather than cellophane tape (masking tape can be moved for adjustments)

- Use erasable markers if marking areas on pumpkin (it comes off unlike other markers)

- Spray carved surfaces with disinfectant and then apply petroleum jelly to retard decay

- Store pumpkin in refrigerator during daylight to preserve it.
Source news-journal.com