My name is John points i'm in the Indian Nations Council in Tulsa, Oklahoma and I'm here today to share some tips and techniques with you on carving jack-o'-lanterns. There are a lot of different instruments you can use to clean your pumpkin which is a really important aspect of preparation. These all look really cool, the boys will gravitate to these because they're big and bright colored, but these don't work well because they don't fit inside the pumpkin. Anything that has teeth on it is probably going to work really well and dads you'll like this one because it comes with a knife inside it more power those are great. A scraper works well because you can get down inside the pumpkin but it's hard to be an old-fashioned measuring cup because you can put your thumb in it you just put your hand right down inside the pumpkin and you get a lot of leverage to clean the inside. For carving there are all sorts of things, we recommend no knives, we only use carving saws they work well, there's lots of them on the market. Personally this is a set that I picked up at Target, they have it every year they're like ten dollars - this is a great set. This is actually the cleaner and it will flat tear it up inside so this is something that I would recommend but at Michaels or Hobby Lobby you can get saws like this these work very well. The thing to remember about a pumpkin is it's a piece of fruit and the minute you put a candle in it you're cooking it and so its life is not going to be very long. That's why they smell so good but they're they're going to shrivel pretty quickly. So go with cold light. There are battery-powered products that work really well that simulate a candle flame. You know, lots of little tea lights out there. I like this one because you can plug it into a wall and you can change the color of the light, so you can put a Christmas light in there. Pumpkins are like people they have a good side and they have a bad side and it's really important to determine which. If you rotate the pumpkin you learn real quick that there's always decide that has calluses. This is the side arrested on the ground. Most people don't realize that pumpkins grow like this and not upright. So we want to put our artwork on the nice clean side and this is where we're going to affix it after we clean our pumpkin. What I recommend is we actually do a circular cut for the lid rather than a sawtooth, because it's always hard to find the way the lid goes. So I have them put a notch in the back a triangular notch and that's going to be on the back of the pumpkin. Then what we do is we just cut a circular lid around the top. Now it's important to note that the saw is coming in at 45 degrees. Not straight up and down 90 degrees or the lid will fall inside. So we want to go in a circular motion around the lid coming in at 45 degrees and this will all make sense when we're finished. The nice thing about a circular lid with the notch - the notch helps you line it up - is if you're lighting your pumpkin and trick-or-treaters are coming you can just drop that lid right on there. You don't have to search for the way it goes. One of the things you want to do when you first get it out, is you just want to take all this extra flesh off. You don't need that and then you want to smoke hole. You want a draft so that when you put a candle in there it will draw air and what I recommend - again this is the back of the pumpkin, here's your notch - we're going to put our smoke hole, we're going to hide it right behind the stem so it's not apparent. So you just cut a little circular hole right there and we clean it and there is your smoke hole and what this does is it makes your candle burn brighter, it draws air in and the smokes allowed to come up here. From the front people looking at your jack-o'-lantern don't see the notch and they don't see the smoke hole. Next is the fun part you get to clean it out and preparation is ninety percent of pumpkin carving.It's really, really important to do a good job on this. I'm going with the measuring cup - this is kind of my instrument of choice. Again all of these things that we looked at earlier are fine but this is what I found works best for me. So the the thing to do is just get in there and get after it and scrape those sides the best you can and we're outside and the nice thing about this is the deer and the possums and the skunks all love the pulp so we're going to be environmentally correct here and recycle. So that is the cleaning and again it's really, really important that you get all that stuff thats hanging down from the side. Now you can see here's are notch - back of the pumpkin - there's our smoke hole and most importantly we cut at 45 degrees so that our lid doesn't fall inside. If you look at it you can see that you've got the surface that the lids gonna rest on. Now look at the inside of our pumpkin now that we've cleaned it i did this with a with a measuring cup. You can see it's really pretty clean and that's real important so again we don't get those hangers on the inside. You can still free hand and put your art on here, but there's a lot of available art that you can transfer onto the pumpkin. Now the problem is you have two dimensional art and you're gonna put it on a three-dimensional globe. What we want to do is we want to find a way to affix our art to the pumpkin. Now you can see that I've taken a pair of scissors and I've cut along the edge of the art like this. I've made incisions and what that does is that allows us to wrap the art. You can overlap and you can wrap the art on there. So we're going to take our artwork, we've got in our good side of the pumpkin, we're going to hold it down there and I'm gonna take masking tape and we're going to overlap that. You can see what I've done there. We're just going to put that masking tape on there like that and we're going to do this all the way around. Once we have the art affixed to the pumpkin we're ready to start the carving process. What you want to do is you want to take a common pushpin and you want to outline your art. So go right along the edge of every line of your art and put a series of holes into the meat of the pumpkin. More holes is better. What you're doing is you're putting a dotted line on the pumpkin that shows where you're going to carve. More holes is better. Once you've completely outlined your art you're ready to start the carving process. The most important thing that you must do is when you start, think of your artwork as a target and you're going to start at the bullseye. OK? So you're going to carve the the nose out first, and then you're gonna go to the eyes, eyebrows, mouth and then finally finished with the hands. The reason for this is if you start at the outside and work in your weakening the pumpkin and when you start sawing in the middle it's all going to collapse. Alright! Well that concludes our session on tips and techniques for pumpkin carving. Hopefully you came up with a few ideas today that you can use, and that you will and I just want to wish you a successful and happy Halloween!
