Halloween is just 2 weeks away!  Whether you intend to spend your Halloween old fashioned trick-or-treating or prefer to go to the church fall festival in costume, this last week of October is sure to be a fun time to let your creative side show a little!

When I was younger, I loved carving pumpkins with my parents.  My mother would take me to a pumpkin patch with a few of the other moms from church, and my friends and I would bolt from the car and and rush into the patch.  The friendly man who owned the land the pumpkins grew on would hack some sugar cane down so that we could suck the juice from it as we ran through his fields to find the perfect carving pumpkin.

Then, Halloween would arrive.  I would rush home from my small Baptist elementary school.   We were allowed to wear our costumes (instead of the usual uniform of knee-lenght plaid skirts) as long as they were wholesome and not too scary.  All day long, my classmates and I would decorate pumpkins with paint and glitter and other knick knacks, and I would blab on about how excited I was to get to do REAL pumpkin carving with my dad.  I remember sitting out on the front porch in the crisp fall air and Dad showing me how to carefully draw a happy face on a pumpkin.  He did all the knife handling, but he would let me pull out all the pumpkin guts and poke the shapes through the front of the pumpkin.  My mother would light a candle and she would help me place it carefully inside.

Even now that I’m out on my own, pumpkin carving – the smells, the feel, and the anticipation of creating a masterpiece from a humble vegetable- immediately take me back to my childhood.  So, since I have barely 14 days until I get to whip out that extra sharp knife and go to work on a giant pumpkin, I figured I should start planning my design for this year.  I’m doing a “Stars Fell on Texas” design, with about 50 stars of all different shapes and a cut out of Texas.

If you don’t already have in mind what you will be carving this year (or if you will be), here are some pictures of pumpkin carvings that I think are really neat.  Even if Halloween is “not your thing,” these pumpkins have really fun, positive designs that would look perfect on a country front porch.

Could this get any better?!?  John Wayne on a pumpkin!  My grandparents have a house on the lake in Arkansas, and there is a portrait of John Wayne above the mantle.  If I’m carving for nostalgia, I might have to add this to my “Stars over Texas” design!
Image Credit: Costume Nation

I think this would be really good to have out on the front porch for when trick-or-treaters come to the door.  The design looks kind of hard, but I’m sure there is a template out there somewhere!
Image Credit: On Thuh List

I saw this on an art website.  This would be another great message to have at the door for when folks come knocking on Halloween.
Image Credit: Distant Visions