Giant Spider Pumpkin Carving

Sometimes a giant spider has to eat a person or three.

Woven into its web are two skulls, a skeletal arm, a couple of bony knees, and one slightly alive person having a very bad day.

Step 1: Acquire a Really Big Pumpkin

It's really hard work to grow a big pumpkin - carving is the easy part.

The folks at Shakefork Community Farm were kind enough to let me adopt one of their giant pumpkins. My scale broke but we're thinking it was a bit over 200 pounds.

Step 2: Carve

There are lots of resources online that show you how to carve a 3d pumpkin (I've written quite a few 'Ibles on the topic myself), but meticulously explaining how this went would drive us both nuts - basically you use clay tools and remove all the parts that are hiding the gross whatever-it-is that you're making.

I sketched out the spider's legs and head and abdomen on the pumpkin with a permanent marker, but I didn't go in with much of a plan for the victims.

I spent about four hours hacking away in my living room on a Friday night, then lugged the beast out to the Arcata Farmers' Market the next morning so a larger number of folks could be terrorized, and logged another five hours of carving. The weather was overcast and almost completely shadowless, which makes the depth and therefore the "story" was a bit hard to read. So I knew I wanted to add color.

Step 3: Add Color, Deploy.

Food coloring sinks into a pumpkin nicely, but when you don't have that white food coloring stuff and you're dealing with skeleton parts, white acrylic craft paint works fine.

Now the beast is crouched by my porch, waiting to devour some hapless trick-or-treaters. I'm hoping to make at least one small child cry. Is that wrong?

Please vote for this Instructable for the Halloween contest if you're so inclined, and visit me at MikeCraghead.com to see more pumpkins and other Stupid Mike Tricks!