The Weekly Widget: Dremel 7000-PK 6-Volt Pumpkin Carving Kit (Thursday)

Let there be light in this pumpkin!

Date of Purchase: September 22, 2010
Price: $19.99
Topics:

First Attempt
Dremel Tool or Marketing Tool?
Practice makes...
Light Source Issues
Level 3 Pumpkin Sorcerer

Light Source Issues

A particularly frustrating thing about this method of carving pumpkins is the task of creating light inside the pumpkin. Our first attempt was a candle, which failed. Our second attempt was 12 candles, which also failed. Our final attempt included a trip to our local home improvement warehouse for some more serious supplies.

Why did the candles fail? Two possible reasons come to mind:

They were simply not bright enough.
-or-
We didn't scrape enough material from our pumpkin.

After filling our pumpkin with multiple candles, we were convinced that it was #2. After spending several hours to produce our pumpkin creation (and a cramped hand), we abandoned the thought of spending any more time cutting on this poor gourd-like squash.

At this point, we opted for a more powerful (and more electric) light source. A stroll through several aisles of electrical supplies and hardware, we settled on two options:

A strand of rope lights
A single bulb work light

The advantage with the rope lights is that they will fit easily inside the pumpkin without modification whereas the work light is brighter but requires some extra cutting, depending on the size of your pumpkin.

ropelight

work light

If you're going for the more dramatic effect of the work light, we suggest that you use a fairly large pumpkin. Otherwise, you may have to improvise by making a few extra cuts. Here's how we made our smaller pumpkin work with the over-sized work light...