Price: $19.99
Topics:
- First Attempt
- Dremel Tool or Marketing Tool?
- Practice makes...
- Light Source Issues
- Level 3 Pumpkin Sorcerer
Monday: First Attempt
This week's widget is a Dremel tool that happens to be a pumpkin carving tool - or a pumpkin carving tool that happens to be a Dremel tool (more on this concept in a later post). The basic concept here is that you can purchase this tool and use it to "carve" a pumpkin (more on this later as well). Today, we'll walk through every step in the pumpkin carving process, as outlined by the included instructions. Along the way, we'll also add several steps to the process that the Dremel folks may have overlooked.
The Dremel tool comes with a grinding tip and some patterns.
Before getting started, you'll need a few more supplies. Here's a shopping list:
- Pumpkin (do we really need to list this?)
- AA Batteries (the tool needs 4, not included)
- Spray-on adhesive
- Adhesive remover (buy it now and save yourself a trip back to the store)
- Scissors
- Knife
- Spoon/Scoop
- Copies of templates (if you plan on reusing them)
- Light Source:
Candles(more on this later)- Work Light
-or- - Rope Lights
- Extension Cord
Once you've gathered your supplies, you'll be ready to get started. The following are the Dremel instructions (directly copied from the included instruction sheet) and our corresponding commentary (in orange).
- Use a knife to cut a lid for your pumpkin. Angle the knife towards the center of the pumpkin as you cut so that the lid will rest on top of the pumpkin after the cut has been made.
- Use a large spoon to clean out the entire inside of the pumpkin. It is best if the walls of your pumpkin are approximately 1/4"-1/2" thick.
- Based on the size of your pumpkin, you can enlarge or reduce the size of your template using a copy machine if needed.
We're assuming that steps 1-3 are tasks that most humans can accomplish on their own. Good luck. Now let's get to the more interesting steps.
- Using spray-on adhesive, apply your template to the pumpkin.
Is it just us, or does this step seem to be lacking some detail? We have the adhesive, the pattern, and the pumpkin - is there something more to this?
Lacking further guidance, we have no choice but to dive right in and give it a try. First, we spray the adhesive on the pumpkin.......and slap on the template. Is this right? Are those wrinkles supposed to be there? Why is this glue so incredibly sticky?
We're not sure if there's a better method to this step, but ours seemed to work out. If you don't happen to have spray adhesive in your glue drawer (and/or if you've never heard of it), be careful - using it is very un-fun.
As we learned during the next step, you'll want to make sure that every inch of the actual pattern is firmly stuck on the surface of the pumpkin and no air pockets are left. It's hard to describe what happens if you neglect this detail, but now you can't say we didn't warn you.
Insert additional step here. It should read: Grab your pumpkin and the tool and find a comfortable place to sit, as you will be grinding away for some time.
- Turn the tool on LOW and begin tracing the areas to be removed.
Yes, you will be grinding straight through the paper and into the pumpkin. At first, you'll probably be nervous about grinding a pumpkin with a power-tool, but once you get used to the tool, it will become more natural. After using extreme caution with our first tedious part (the eye of our jack-o-lantern), we wondered how long this whole process would take. Don't worry, you will become faster with practice.
Additional step should read: Perform these steps over a drop-cloth, as you will be carving pieces of a pumpkin with a tiny spinning blade - which happens to make pumpkin paste (isn't that what they use to make pumpkin pie?) out of any piece of pumpkin that it touches.
- You can use the HIGH setting for large area material removal.
This should also read: You can use the HIGH setting once you have practiced on low setting and desire to carve a pumpkin in less than 3 hours.
- The key is to remove approximately the same amount of material on your whole pumpkin to achieve a uniform depth.
You may think that you've done a good job of this at first, but you haven't. Once you've cleaned off all of the pumpkin paste (we suggest that you do this over a sink), you'll see that you weren't quite as consistent as you may have figured. Don't worry though - you can go back to it with the tool and clean up the pattern later as long as you were able to color inside the lines the first time around. - Once you've finished, remove the paper template, place a light source, such as a candle, in the pumpkin, dim the lights, and see how well the light shines through your carving.Once you've finished, you will have spent two hours of your life to get something that looks like this...
Then, you'll attempt to remove the paper template. It's interesting that the instructions mention this as if it's a simple task - it isn't. Remember that extremely sticky spray adhesive? As it turns out, it's still extremely sticky when you try to remove it. Who would have guessed? After your first attempt at removing the template, your pumpkin will look something like this....
If you were wondering why adhesive remover was on your shopping list, this is your justification. You'll need to do some major scrubbing with this stuff before your pumpkin starts to look like a pumpkin again and not a high school abstract art project. When you're finished with this "small" step, you will finally see the results of your work. This is when you may need to hit the pattern again with the tool to clean up the depth of your carving.
The next part of this multi-step step is to place a light source, such as a candle. Rather than using a candle, which doesn't give nearly enough light, we opted for a work-light (stay tuned, exploring this topic requires a separate post).
- If you want more light to shine through, turn the lights back on, remove the candle, and remove additional material from your pumpkin.
This step leaves out one important detail: it is much easier to remove material from the inside of the pumpkin than it is to carve extra material from the pattern. As long as your pattern is uniformly carved, you can simply scrape the inside of the pumpkin to thin it out. If your desired light source is a candle, you'll have a lot more scraping to do.
Once you've finished all 9 (or 10 or 15?) steps, you should end up with something that looks like the frightening figure below. As mentioned, we used a work light with a 60 watt bulb, which seemed to create a fairly dramatic effect (just don't leave it out in the rain). Our total time to complete the project (not including several shopping trips) was approximately 3 hours. Our guess is that more practice will yield faster times.
2 comments:
Love the extra steps. Definitely too much work for me with my 5 and 3 year old in tow. We'll stick to small knives.
Looks like a lot of fun!
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