When it comes to this time of year we always have arguments about exactly what we are going to carve on to our pumpkins. This year I decided to take all of the stress away from the decision and I downloaded some free templates online.We were hoping to go pumpkin picking but it seems that everyone else had already had the same idea as our local pumpkin picking farm is suffering a shortage so we had to buy our pumpkins from the local vegetable market. We then printed off the four templates that the girls selected from those available on the Ladbrokes website. We had great fun trying to decide which ones to choose and I was really impressed to see a variety of difficulties available. This meant that the girls could choose designs that were simple enough for them to do themselves.
When deciding what to use to carve the pumpkins we bought a cheap pumpkin carving kit however we found it a lot easier to use spoons and knives from the kitchen (with supervision). The pumpkin carving kit was alright on the smallest pumpkin as it was quite soft but we needed to use one of our steak knives on the largest one which had a really thick skin.
The girls love being able to carve their own pumpkins and this is the first year that they have been able to do this mainly by themselves. We did cut the top off for them and then showed them how to scoop out all of the seeds.
Carving pumpkins is a fantastic family activity at this time of year and we all had so much fun doing this together using the printed templates that I downloaded. It was so much easier having something to copy rather than making it up as I was going along and the pumpkins looked fantastic at the end.
