Pumpkin Decorating: day 2

I suppose there actually is a silver lining in every cloud.  I took Baby Bear to the doc on Friday and was told she has the swine flu.  The poor dear went from "kinda sickly" on Friday morning to "really yucky" within a few hours.  The silver lining I mentioned was that, after she started treatment, she was feeling much better and wanting to create.  We needed some sedentary activities to do, so the pumpkins finally got some more attention.

I de-gutted the first pumpkin as Baby Bear looked on.  She was really looking forward to cutting holes in it with the apple corer.  She wasn't strong enough to push the corer all the way through, but she did the best she could, then handed it over to me.  I used a hammer to tap the corer in, then pulled it out, leaving the little round plugs in the pumpkin shell.  Baby Bear poked the plugs through, then reached inside the pumpkin to fish them out.  It was great fun!  We were quite satisfied with the result.

Unfortunately, we didn't have the same luck with the green pumpkin (or pumpkin-like gourd) and the apple corer.  It looks grey in the pic, but really it's a pretty soft sage color and I was really looking forward to carving it.  First, I nearly lost my knife; I got it stuck, trying to cut a nice little lid out of the top.  This thing was as dense as concrete and almost as heavy, too!  The stem broke off in the car, so I had nothing to pull the top off with once I got it cut.  I pried and pulled, hammered and pushed, but nothing worked.  I finally gave up on the top and tried to put holes in it with the apple corer.  Bad idea.  I finally did get the thing hammered in up to the hilt, but then I couldn't get it out!  Alas, I believe that is the last of my little plastic apple corer.  In trying to extract it, I broke off little orange slivers, leaving sharp edges to cut fingers on.  Anyway, we ended up with one holey orange pumpkin, instead of two polka-dotted ones. 

Next, we broke out the glitter.  I chose crystal glitter for this project, because I wanted to keep the natural color of the pumpkins.  Now, I had purchased a dainty little pumpkin to glitter, but my dear sweet little girl immediately claimed that one as her own.  She decided to decorate it as a birthday gift to her daddy, as his birthday is so close to Halloween.  She did a great job, but I wish I'd had another little one.  The glitter seems somehow out of place on this hulking, ungainly vegetable.  The color looked much more uniform once the glue dried, but I found some spots where I must have accidently wiped it with my sleeve, so I'll have to touch those up before displaying it. 

"After" pics will be forthcoming, but we have three left to decorate first.  Yes, I do realize I went a little pumpkin-crazy this year.