Peaches McGee: Hoo’s Your Owl Daddy?

Right in time for Halloween, I completed another Martha Stewart project from her book, “Martha Stewart’s Handmade Holiday Crafts.”

Every year, we carve pumpkins at my dad’s house and it’s not something that I take lightly… I want to have the BEST pumpkin (and more often than not, that’s not the case). Isn’t it neat how I make everything a competition?

Martha has a project titled “Carved-Pumpkin Owls” and they looked super cute, even if the instructions are a little daunting (power drills, wood gouge???).

Before you actually begin the project, you must determine what kind of owl that you want to make, because that in turn determines how many pumpkins/gourds you need. I went for a petite little owl (I’ve always wanted to be petite, but at 5’10”, that’s a pipe dream). Therefore, I needed three pumpkins, one regular-sized one, and two small ones. The remaining instructions are as follows:

Tools (drill with 5/8" bit, knife, wood gouge, measuring teaspoons)

1. You cut a hole in the larger pumpkin and scoop out the guts (make sure to keep the seeds… YUM)

2. Drill holes for the eyes in the larger pumpkin with a 5/8” bit

3. Cut a hole in the top of each smaller pumpkin that is slightly larger than the eye holes for the bigger pumpkin and scoop out the guts. At this point, I had to use measuring teaspoons in order to get inside the tiny pumpkin (read my previous comment about not being petite myself).

4. Drill a hole in the bottom of the smaller pumpkins, but be careful not push too hard and break it (oops, I did)

5. Take four lights from a battery operated set of lights, rubber-band them together, and then push them through each eye hole. I let the remaining lights just hang in the pumpkin and added another set as well. Martha advises wrapping them around a glass jar and securing the wires with tape, but why? That’s an extra step and doesn’t guarantee that you won’t burn the place down.

6. Use toothpicks (I broke mine in half – on purpose this time) to attach the smaller pumpkins to the larger one over the eye holes

7. Use a wood gouge and make graduated rows of “feathers” in the skin of the pumpkin. I wanted to make mine a little more exaggerated and accidentally removed the skin. Grrrr. So, I pulled a Tim Gunn from Project Runway, and “made it work.”