Christene's Squid-o-Lantern

On October 14th Kimberly Dawn Wells announced a pumpkin carving contest for lensmasters. Participants had until October 24th 2010 to carve a Squidoo themed Jack-o-Lantern and then make a Squidboo lens showing it off.

There was a community wide vote for the best pumpkin during the last week of October. The chosen winner earned $25 and awarded a Squidoo Charity of their choice an additional $25. The lens also counts toward The SquidBoo October 2010 Challenge.

There were only 3 entries but my Squid-o-Lantern won!

curated from my Flickr account

My first thought was to use the Squid Logo, but that's not very Halloween-y. Then I figured one of the new SquidMonsters would be perfect!

I looked through a few of the trophy lenses, and some of Squidoo's own Monster themed pages and decided on the Monster that we all see on our Level page (minus the number on it's belly).

I worked on the image in Photoshop for a bit, changing the circle so the SquidMonster's tentacles hit the border, and reducing the colors to only 3. One for the sections to be cut out, one for the areas that needed to be scraped, and the last for the parts that would remain untouched. Then I had to blow it up to fit on a pumpkin, and print it out.

This is a smaller version of what it looked like:

(Don't worry your eyes are fine, the pic is fuzzy.)

Black: Cut Out

White: Scrape

Orange: Do Nothing

I used my Pumpkin Masters pokers to transfer the image on to the pumpkin, and their saws to cut out the black shapes.

I used a wood carving tool to scrape away the skin of the pumpkin from the white parts of my template.

Free Pumpkin Carving Patterns
Are you spending too much time looking for Free Printable Patterns for your Jack-o-Lantern? I've put together this list of great websites so you don't have to wade through...