Here at Student Experience, we want to give you a rundown of the things you could get up to during the darker evenings or the colder weekends. This week, I decided it was time to brush up on my “Arts and Crafts” skills with a great evening of pumpkin carving with friends.
Although we may have planned this with a weeks' notice, we still found ourselves doing a supermarket dash at 3:50 pm on a Sunday before the unimpressed till lady shooed us out for close! In case you have a vivid imagination, imagine two women running around the grocery aisle looking for the best pumpkin whilst one wears her tea stained sweatpants and moth hole T-shirt whilst the other is still in her muddy sodden rugby kit (Yes, the one wearing rugby kit was me and yes, I was still wearing my boots...). You get the picture, we’re classy ladies!
So after a thorough shower and a heavy mug of probably our fifth cup of tea, the carving was under way. We decided that the best course of action would be to empty the contents of the pumpkin first with an array of kitchen utensils. Grab a bucket if its more than just the one pumpkin being carved because trust me, there’s more pumpkin gut in there than you think! Once we’d hollowed out the middle of our pumpkins, it was time to get creative. Using whatever pens or markers we could find in the nearby draws, we created stencils of our designs; I’d gone for a Tim Burton-esk design like his character Jack Skellington in ‘The nightmare before Christmas’ whilst my friend decided to go all out and draw a realistic skull. I highly recommend that if you’re doing a detailed section on a pumpkin to grab a toothpick and use that to carve with, so you don’t end up slashing the side of your pumpkin when you slip slightly!
To say this was a great way to spend an evening with friends is an understatement and is something you should try your hand at if you’re looking for something to do on a Friday evening!