Pumpkin Carving Out of Wood - Pumpkin Cookies I Easy Wood Carving for Beginners

Hope you all had a Happy Halloween.

Hope you're still alive :D

This Halloween we made special cookies for Halloween - pumpkin and skull-shaped cookies.

I will share the tutorial on making Halloween cookies shaped as pumpkins here, while the story on how to make skull-shaped cookies will be revealed in the next instructable.

I really enjoyed the whole process, it was really cool.
Of course, my hubby did the first part as pumpkin cookies implied wood carving, while I did the rest with the dough and cookies itself.

So, maybe you'll do such cookies even this year or next Halloween.

I shall admit it's easy and took us probably an hour or so.

Supplies

My hubby used three gouges, while I think he could go only with one :D

Plus one whittling knife was used as well. I'll share the links to those later on.

As Usually We Start With Drawing

First, we drew the pumpkin on the paper, the one we wanted to have. Basically you can do any other pumpkin, with bigger eyes or even more scary mouth. To me, honestly, all pumpkins look alike.

And then just copy the picture with the carbon paper on wood. As for wood, we went with basswood. This project doesn't require any special coloring or finish afterwards so just basswood would be easy to carve and work with.

As We Have Already Our Pumpkin Ready to Be Carved Out, It's Time to Get the Knife

My hubby is in love with BeaverCraft tools, this is why for this project he used their knife as well. He bought it on Amazon, attaching the link as well, maybe that would be helpful for you in case you're tight on budget and wanna start with wood carving. Quality is more than satisfying.

We need to go with the knife along the lines we drew a couple of mins before. Make sure to cut along the contours. First, cut the eyes of a pumpkin, then the nose and mouth of our lovely pumpkin.

For Now We Need to Get Rid of Some Wood Along to the Lines We Cut Out Before

Some bent gouge would help you out here. We need to start removing wood next to the parts of the pumpkin's face. In a slow-flowing manner get rid of wood. Hopefully pics above would help you out in this. Nothing difficult at this stage, wood carving is all about removing wood :D

As We Did Some Basic Job, We Need to Go Into Some Detailing Here

The previous gouge we used for the big area of wood to be removed. Now a gouge with a thiner tip, it's usually called V-parting chisel, will help us to remove some wood that is too close to eyes and mouth.

Finishing Touches

The main goal is to receive a pumpkin with eyes, nose, and mouth in relief. Which is why one more gouge is to help us to get closer to the goal, it has a slightly bent tip to work out some hard-to-get spots for the regular gouge.

If you're not really into detail work, and not having a perfectionist type of thinking, then you can easily go working on a pumpkin with only one knife and one gouge.

Almost Done. TWO Options Left

You can either start working with the dough and pumpkin in the wood, or you can go use a jigsaw to separate our small pumpkin from wood, it would probably be easy to work with the dough having small pumpkin in hand.

But PLEASE NOTE you should be very careful with the jigsaw, considering the size of our pumpkin and jigsaw it's really easy to lose fingers. And we need them for the next projects, right? :D

Brave Husband

My hubby desided to give it a shot, a jigsaw helped him to get a small pumpkin out of wood.

Hopefully you'll succeed in it as well.

As you can see, making pumpkins is really easy.

Plus the whole idea is practical, not just Jack-o-lantern for one night, but pumpkin cookies for a week or so. And then you can do some more cookies as pumpkins are already ready to dance with the dough :D

Comment if you enjoyed the instructable.

And I'll go working on the next instructable with skull-shaped cookies. This year Halloween was really cool.

But what's even better, I'm gonna have some Halloween this Saturday again, gonna make some pumpkin and skull cookies :D