Kotas Reviews The Pumpkin Masters Jumbo Pumpkin Carving Kit

Happy Halloween everybody! I absolutely LOVE Halloween. It may in fact be the perfect holiday. You go around, threatening others with vague maliciousness until they give you candy, and you avoid retribution by putting on an elaborate disguise! In addition, you are supposed to scare the bejeezus out of people at the same time! Truly a fantastic holiday that also involves the ritual defacement of gourds. 

As a child, and even into my adulthood, I have always wanted to do Halloween "right". Elaborate decorations, a robust assortment of candy, and scaring everyone who dared approach for said candy. In one way or another I managed to accomplish all of that, except one thing. My parents and later on, myself, were always really really  bad at carving Jack-O-Lanterns. Oh, they looked alright, but they were never particularly spooky or interesting. Well friends, TODAY THAT ENDS. This year? I decided to, with the prompting of my spouse, pick up the product that will solve all my pumpkin carving related problems.

Pumpkin Masters: In Color.

You know, for $5, this is a decent package. You get a plastic scraper thing, a pumpkin saw, and a plastic poker dealy. The label promises "stronger tools", so I'm sort of concerned about what the previous level of tool strength was, but oh well. Onward!

Isn't that spectacular? Hint: No.

SPOOOOOOOOOOKY!

So this kit comes with the three tools and five sheets of patterns for various spooky carving fun. The basic idea is that you wet the pattern, slap it on the pumpkin, and then use it as a guide for your carving, the end result being a pretty awesome pumpkin carving. Seems simple enough, right? Right. 

My long suffering wife was actually the one to utilize the tools for their intended purpose. This was decided upon when I was required to put our own Little Monster to bed, in spite of the fact that said Little Monster wanted to stay up and run around. Luckily, I got to help with the clean up and did use all the tools at least once. I also took some pictures.

The lucky victim subject, a hollow shell of its former self.

The directions state that one should cut a hole in the bottom of the pumpkin, and scrape it down to one inch in thickness. The scraper actually works pretty good for this purpose and the pumpkin was mostly hollowed out by the time I arrived on the scene. I used it later for some additional clean up work, and it is a lot faster than using a spoon, simply due to the width of the blunt blade bit. You could probably also use this for light spackling, but that's not why we are here today. The next step is to slap on the pattern and throw some cling wrap around it. Then, the butchering begins.

My face! My beautiful face! Stare into my accusing eyes!

The pattern stayed on really well, surprisingly enough, though the cling wrap we had some problems with. It mostly worked as intended though, keeping the mess to a minimum. One slip up we had was that you are supposed to carve from the inside to the outside, but we ended up doing it the other way 'round. Oops. This caused a few problems with the final detail cuts, as the pumpkin did not have nearly the stability necessary for them.

Sorry nifty belly feathers, you aren't getting cut today.

Most of the cutting is done by using the awl thing to poke a starter hole, and then use the saw to slice through the pumpkin. The awl is kind of cheap as hell. It's bendy, flimsy, and we almost broke it a few times. The saw was considerably better, and cuts fairly quickly through the pumpkin's succulent flesh, but the blade has a tendency to bend a bit during the process, which is good for getting those curved portions, and bad for keeping the blade around for more than one or two full uses. 

All done! Doesn't look like much, does it?

The pattern scraps come off pretty easy, and you are left with your dazzling creation. I don't have much of an eye for such things, Unlit jack-o-lanterns always look odd to me, since you can't really see what the artist intended. But they know what they were going for, and when you add a candle?

It's got it where it counts.

On the FACE Rating System, I give this kit 2 smiley faces. Sure, the tools are kind of cheap, but at $5 for the whole shebang I wasn't expecting them to be particularly sturdy, though the scraper is pretty solid. It certainly enabled us to have a fancy dancy pumpkin this year, even if between us we have all the artistry of a 4th grade art class. True masters of the gourd carving art will want to avoid, but for the rest of us? $5 well spent. In addition, since the majority of the tools are pretty blunt (the plastic awl being the exception), these tools are a lot safer than Ye Old Kitchen Knife around the kiddos.