Last week I showed you how to make a cameo pumpkin, free of the hassles of dealing with cheap carving tools and pumpkin guts. This week we will be breaking out the carving tools and then some.
I Googled “cool pumpkin ideas” and came upon this website. It shows you how to make a rainbow fire jack-o-lantern with ordinary household materials and seemed relatively easy to pull off.
Well, I purchased hand sanitizer and roach repellent, which would serve as boric acid. I followed the instructions, but the pumpkin would not catch fire.
A pumpkin torch. Photo by Alec Damiano.More boric acid. Zilch. More hand sanitizer. Negative.
I squeezed the bottle and let the goop drip all over the damned thing.
Fired up the lighter again. Fail.
I added lighter fluid and still nothing. This seemed like the pumpkin from hell. Then I got a paper towel, doused it in lighter fluid and put it inside the pumpkin. I lit it up. FINALLY!
The pumpkin didn’t produce a rainbow flame or light up from the outside as it was supposed to, but it did create an impressive 2-foot-high flame. It only burned for as long as the paper lasted. If you want it to last all night long, use a charcoal briquette. Perhaps carve several of these little pumpkins and create flaming luminaries to light up your pathway.
After that battle, I undertook another pumpkin project, this one safer and involving less chemicals. This miniature scene would make a brilliant conversation piece at a Halloween party.
First, I cut a pumpkin almost in half to create a “stage”. Then I stuffed some miniature Halloween props I bought at the dollar store into it. In this case, I used a plastic skeleton, tombstone, reindeer grass and glass rocks typically used to decorate plants and aquariums.
Then, I carved a face into the other half of the pumpkin to serve as a “window” for the scene inside. I made sure the eyes and mouth were large enough for passerby to peer inside.
To illuminate the scene, I added an electronic tea light candle.
I then used my leftover props to create a miniature cemetery around the skeleton sitting inside his pumpkin house.
For those of you who wish to explore further, here are some other interesting jack-o-lantern projects:
• Create a smoke bomb out of sugar and potassium nitrate. Instructions can be found here.
• As a variation of the above, use dry ice to make fog emanate out of your pumpkin’s holes (orifices?) like the mist of an enchanted witch forest. Put a tall container of water inside your pumpkin and drop a piece of dry ice into it. Replace the lid tightly so the flow of the fog won’t be messed up. You can add more dry ice over time to lengthen the life of the fog.
• If you’ve had experience with pyrotechnics and more than basic chemistry, you might want to try making a self-carving exploding pumpkin. Here is your guide. If I couldn’t even get lighter fluid to ignite, this would probably be a recipe for disaster in my hands.
• Want to make the flames go even higher and have a day to spare? Soak a roll of toilet paper in kerosene for 24 hours and watch your pumpkin become not a mere torch, but a flamethrower.
• Add some flame colorants to your lantern. Break a road flare and achieve a red glow. Boric acid is supposed to turn fire green, while epsom salts are meant to make it white. A table of chemicals and their resulting colors can be found here.
A traditional, closed-style pumpkin. Photo by Alec Damiano.
Do you know of any interesting art, entertainment or crafts you’d like me to cover? Tweet me at @DamianoAlec or email me at Alec.Damiano@asu.edu. To see some of my artwork, click here.
