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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.
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