Easy Clean-Up Pumpkin Carving

Step-by-step Pumpkin Carving with Trimaco

With Halloween just around the corner, we decided to carve some pumpkins to display. With that in mind, we gathered our pumpkin carving supplies, put on some spooky tunes and got to work. If you’re planning on carving pumpkins for Halloween, follow these easy steps:

Step One

Gather your materials and set up your surface protection. Whether you’re carving indoors or outdoors, surface protection will make cleaning up a breeze. If you’re using a table, tape your surface protector down with a low-tack adhesive tape like our Blue Painter’s Tape.

Materials needed:

Pumpkins
Surface Protector (we recommend X-Board)
Knives, or pumpkin carving kit
Masking Paper for stencil
Marker or pen
Wonder Rags
Blue Painter’s Tape

Optional:

Tea lights/candles
Bowl for seeds
Toothpicks
Candy (for snacking)

Step Two

Start carving your pumpkin by cutting the top or bottom off to create an opening. Use a spoon or pumpkin scraping tool to remove all of the seeds and slime. Set the seeds aside in a bowl if you want to roast them later!

Step Three

Use a marker or pen to draw the outline of your design to create a stencil. You can draw a face, a ghost, or other design on a thin sheet of paper, such as Trimaco’s Masking Paper. Make sure your design is the right size for your pumpkin.

Step Four

Tape your stencil to the pumpkin. Use a knife or the poker tool that comes in a pumpkin carving kit to poke holes through the stencil and into the pumpkin.

Step Five

Remove the stencil. Use a knife to cut along the lines you poked. As you cut, remove pieces of pumpkin as needed. Using a pumpkin carving kit with a small, serrated knife would work best.

Step Six

Once your pumpkin is carved, clean up the space. Clean up is easy and hassle-free when using a surface protector like X-Board — just roll it up and throw it away.

Step Seven

Grab a candle and display your pumpkin. If you cut the top of the pumpkin off, place the candle inside. If you cut off the bottom, you can set the pumpkin down on top of the candle.

Either way, you now have a spooky or fun pumpkin to display for Halloween!

Some additional things we learned:

Using a pumpkin carving kit is easier, but kitchen knives and metal spoons work in a pinch.
If you use cookie cutters to cut shapes or letters into pumpkins, make sure they are big enough to break through the pumpkin rind.
If a piece falls out that you didn’t intend to cut, don’t panic! Set the piece aside and once you’re finished carving, use a toothpick or paperclip to put the piece back into place.