Pumpkin Carving Stencils

The set starts with eight easy faces: big eyes, triangle noses and wide grins that a first-time carver can finish in half an hour. The middle eight are single silhouettes such as a bat, a black cat, a witch hat and a skull. The last eight are scenes. A haunted house stands in front of a full moon, an owl sits inside another moon, a witch flies across the sky, and two pages spell BOO and Happy Halloween in stencil letters.

Every design uses three shades. Black areas are cut all the way through, grey areas are scraped down until the flesh is thin, and white stays as it is. The scraped parts glow a softer orange, so the advanced scenes get a moon or a hill behind the main shape. We checked each pattern so that no island of pumpkin is left hanging: letters like O and B have small bridges, and the teeth on the faces stay joined to the mouth.

The first pages explain the process step by step, with a contents page showing all 24 designs so you can pick one before you print.

• Cover page
• How-to page: printing, trimming, tracing with a pin tool, carving and scraping
• Contents page with small previews of all 24 designs
• 8 easy faces, including a vampire, a cat face and a wink
• 8 medium silhouettes: bat, black cat, spider, witch hat, moon with bats, skull, cauldron, mummy
• 8 advanced scenes: haunted house, owl in the moon, spider web, BOO, Happy Halloween, witch on a broom, graveyard, cat on a fence

Print at 100% for a large pumpkin. For a medium pumpkin, set the scale to 70 to 85%. Plain printer paper bends around the curve better than card stock, and black and white printing is enough.