I finally got around to getting the pictures of my Halloween pumpkins loaded onto the computer.

The first one is mine. I decided to go with something pretty simple this year. You'll see why a little later.


This next one is Christine's. There's a bit of a story to this one. Apparently, when she was little, this is how she used to draw people's faces. You can tell by the nose that she had an eye for detail. If you think about it, most people's noses are somewhat pointy and have two nostrils. It's actually pretty accurate for a kid. For an adult, as a jack-o-lantern, I think it's funny.

Sorry about the photo on that one. It turned out pretty fuzzy, didn't it? Perhaps my focus was a bit off.

The next one is the reason I decided to go simple on the other two. This one is not actually a real pumpkin, but a carvable foam one my mother-in-law gave me last year after seeing the one I did with my own photo (see my profile picture). Her idea was that I could carve that into foam and keep using it. Instead, I waited until this year and picked a picture with both Christine and myself. I think it turned out pretty good. On this photo you can see the coarse texture of the foam. Just ignore that, please.

I used a photo from our wedding as the inspiration. Mostly because it was the one I found I thought would work. I didn't use it last year on my real pumpkin because I thought Christine's glasses would be too hard to do. And there were a lot of places it would need to be thinned in order to get the proper shading. With a real pumpkin I thought it would be too difficult, but I decided to try it on the foam and it worked great. Of course, my mother saw a different meaning in my choice of photo. She asked if I used the wedding photo because I thought getting married was so scary that the only way to truly express the horror was to carve it into a jack-o-lantern. She also said she thought I looked like Frankenstein. She did not comment about Christine being the bride of Frankenstein. One guess as to who her favorite is.

Here is a photo of all three together.


We didn't stay home on halloween, so I didn't get to hear everyone say how my pumpkins were the coolest ones they've ever seen, so you can do so here. Actually, I'm not sure anyone even saw them. We left for a party before it got dark, so we lit them all just as we were leaving (the foam with a battery-powered light bulb sitting in the window). When we got home later that night, none of them were lit! The candles in the real ones turned out to be duds and stayed lit just long enough to burn the wick down to the wax and go out. And the batteries in my other one had died. I have no idea if anyone even saw them. I was able to get things fixed long enough to take some pictures, and with an extra candle I was able to light them the next night, but it wasn't the same.