13 Days of Halloween: Day 2

Halloween just isn't the same without a pumpkin or a jack-o'-lantern. Pretty soon I'll be taking a trip to go pick out a pumpkin or two to carve for Halloween. I love pumpkin carving, it's one of my favorite traditions. It's so much fun and I always enjoy it. Also, I love finding new pumpkin carving designs and patterns to try out every year. Although I very much enjoy pumpkin carving, I do understand how it also can be quite a hassle. It's messy, very time-consuming, you have to be very careful about making mistakes, you have to worry about it rotting once you carve it and you could maybe even injure yourself. Well the other day I found some really interesting no-carve pumpkin ideas from Better Homes and Gardens and Home Made Simple  that maybe some of you might want to try out. I'm even thinking about maybe trying one of them out this year...

Stenciled Pumpkins. I really like this idea. I like the look of the black design on white, it looks so pretty.

Rhinestone Pumpkin. This one looks really cool too. You decorate your pumpkin with some black rhinestones and then you put a fake crow on top, which adds a bit a of spookiness to it. What I find interesting about it is that you can just decorate it with the rhinestones if you want or you can just put the crow on top, either way it would still look pretty neat.

Silhouette Pumpkins. This one's also pretty interesting. Here there's some carving involved, but all you do is you carve out the inside and you carve away just a bit of the outside around your silhouette design. So you can get a real nice glowing effect that's almost similar to that of a jack-o'-lantern without having to worry about cutting through the rind, which can be real thick sometimes.

This is great. Instead of a jack-o'-lantern try a junk-o'-lantern. If you got any junk laying around your house attach it to your pumpkin and make whatever you want out of it.

This one's my favorite. I love the idea of a chalkboard pumpkin and I've seen them on many other sites before. What's great about this one it is that all you really need is some chalkboard paint that you can paint or spray on your pumpkin yourself. Then once it dries you can take any piece of chalk and write whatever saying you want on it or draw whatever design you want on it. Then if you make a mistake or you simply change your mind and want to try something else, you can just erase it. It's perfect!

Now I really can't wait to go pick out a pumpkin. I'll most likely end up carving a design from a  booklet that I usually buy every year around Halloween, unless I find a design I really like online. Although if I suddenly don't feel like carving or I don't have time to, I guess I've now got some other ideas I could try.