House & Apartment Number Pumpkins

Add some personality to your home for autumn and Halloween by carving out the numbers of your house or apartment in the front of your gourd!

To get started, you will need to gather these materials:

• a real or plastic pumpkin
• pumpkin carving tools (I'm using those from Pumpkin Masters)
• old newspaper
• a copy of house numbers (not shown but optional) or a marker

These are the rest of the items that are not shown, but you will also need:

• black paint
• paint brush
• X-acto knife (optional, if you plan on using number stencils)

Note: when choosing your pumpkin the first time you make this project, make sure that your pumpkin is not too big or too small; it should be about the same as an average sized basketball.

To begin, lay out some old newspaper on your workspace for easy clean-up.

Now, prep the pumpkin by following the directions from the Pumpkin Masters carving tools. Cut a hole on the bottom, open it, and use a scraper tool to remove the pumpkin seeds and guts. Then, use that same tool to shave off the inner wall to about 1" thick.

Choose your house numbers to place on the front of your pumpkin. You can use stencils or draw free-handed. This is all up to you; I decided to test my free-hand skills as I write out the numbers of my house 155 on the front.

The numbers might be hard to see in this photo, but you will get to really see it when I start carving them out.

Now, basically, from there, you're just going to follow the outlines by carving away the numbers.

Finally, use some black paint to the paint the inside of the outlines.

Now, just display your pumpkins on the front porch or window sill of your apartment building. If you live in an apartment building, you can also make a pumpkin that showcases your apartment number. For instance, my white pumpkin has 4F on the front to represent my apartment number.