Martha's Halloween Helpline

Martha's Halloween Helpline

Pumpkin Carving Templates, Decorations, Recipes & Costume How-to Posted Oct-27-2006

By Chris Dunmire

A friend of mine who knows about my creativity enthusiast nature recently showed me a copy of the 2006 Halloween issue of Martha Stewart's Living magazine. The front cover features the latest creative pumpkin carving designs and effects that by far has traditional triangle-eyed carved pumpkins looking like something from the stone age. Literally.

Yes, thanks to people like Martha and template technology, pumpkin carving designs seem to get more intricately detailed and imaginative as each new Halloween season arrives. And the good thing is that pumpkin carving enthusiasts not named Martha can join in on the fun too.

I don't watch the Martha Stewart TV show, but I did read the Halloween issue cover-to-cover to catch up on this year's latest and greatest pumpkin carving and decoration techniques. I noticed that a few of the projects in the magazine referred to the MarthaStewart.com Web site for complementary features, including Web-exclusive projects with printable templates. Cool! So today I visited the site to mine these projects, and here's what I found:

Upon locating the Halloween section, a video clip from the TV show with Martha and Gloria Estefan making a black cat candy bowl for Halloween began to play. Other Halloween project how-to videos from the show were also available to play. Further down the screen, a section on Pumpkin Carving displayed several how-to projects and instructional bits including Translucent Pumpkins, Pumpkin Carving 101, Essential Pumpkin Carving Tools, Cookie Cutter Pumpkins, Lace-Patterned Pumpkins, Stained Glass Pumpkins, and Stacked Jacks. The page also had sections called Devilish Decorating, Repulsive Recipes, and one cleverly tagged 'Bad Things' which featured Black Magic Carved Pumpkins and a variety of spidery, webby, witchy, skeletony, and other creepy project things.

Now for the Web-exclusive stuff. The Pumpkin Carving Templates for Halloween section has several exclusive online projects with templates including Witching Hour (Flying Witch), Pumpkin Window Cut-outs, and Facial Features, among a dozen other project templates you can download and print for free to use in your own personal pumpkin carving projects.

But wait! There's more. Martha also has a section called Costume Central, featuring over two dozen how-to projects for various kinds of costumes and make-up effects from masks and family costume themes to scratches and bruises. Now that's just dandy (and I'm sure there's another section somewhere titled creative candy)!

So there you have it, Martha's Halloween Helpline. Everything you ever need to know about pumpkins and parties right at your fingertips. (Here it comes...) And how can that not be a good thing? •

© 2006 Chris Dunmire www.chrisdunmire.com. All rights reserved.