Candy This Way

" There's no doubt about where to get the goodies when you light up the night with this clever display. This is a really fun way to make the path to your house a little more special for all your trick or treaters. So what you need to do is you need to start out with 4 pumpkins about the same size. These are all pretty small pumpkins. And you're gonna download a template for this from bhg.com. So I've got my template already printed out and I've actually pasted it right here on to my pumpkin. And then to transfer the stencil from the little template to the pumpkin, I'm gonna use a little poker tool like this. These come in pretty much in every pumpkin carving set. If you don't happen to have a pumpkin carving set, you can always use a large safety pin works just fine. So I'm just gonna transfer the design just by poking around like this. And if you really like ideas like this, you can find a ton more in Halloween Tricks and Treats Magazine that you can check out at a news stand nearby. Okay. So once you've got your design transferred on to your pumpkin then you're gonna start etching it. Now what I also did with this pumpkin is hollowed out the back. This is really important because you're actually gonna stick these on top of posts so can't hollow it from underneath. I also am gonna take the stem off of my pumpkin so that it's nice and flat so it looks like a nice piece of hard candy. So with a little wood carving set, you can get this from any craft store, I think it's about $5 for a whole set of them, you use this to carve out your design. So I'm just kinda do it like this. So if you are gonna light these up, you wanna make sure that you etch off as much of the rind as possible so that the pumpkin is nice and thin in the parts where you want the light to really show throw. You can always use a nice permanent marker to outline your letters so that you can really see it. So I'm just gonna put T and we do the C here, and outline it around the outside. And now to make it look just like a piece of hard candy, of course, you need a wrapper for your candy. So I've just got a piece of cellophane here that I've cut to the right size. And I'm just gonna stick my pumpkin right in the middle there and just wrap it around like that. You're starting to see it's looking like a little piece of candy, huh? So for this side, I've actually got some black ribbon here that I'm gonna use to tie the sides. Okay. So now we've got it looking like a piece of candy. If you are going to still open up the back you put some lights in there, you're gonna just wanna cut around a little bit. And you know what, I wouldn't recommend using a candle with these because of the cellophane. So go with the battery operated light instead. And so now, we need to find a way to mount it. So for that I've got a wooden dowel here that I've actually covered with just some scrap booking paper. If you wanna actually do this so that it's weather resistant you can coat the outside or put some contact paper over the top of the scrap booking paper. And that'll make sure it sticks around for a little bit longer. So I've got that dowel and now underneath I'm gonna drill a hole that's a little bit smaller than the size of my dowel so that I can stick the dowel into the pumpkins. Now this is such a fun way to light a path to your house or put it in your front lawn to let people the people know where the candy is. That way you can have your own private little candy land. "