Legendary
So this weekend my girlfriend and I ATTEMPTED to go apple picking, for like the fourth week in a row and ACTUALLY made it out the door this time for it. We got to where we THOUGHT it was, only to find out we were slightly off. Once we got to the orchard though, it was closed, which sucked. So we drove back to the shops for the orchard (we had left there to go to the 'Pick Your Own Apples' area), shopped around and eventually bought some pumpkins, cider donuts, cookies and cider. That night, we sat down with her brothers and decided to pick out our designs for the pumpkins. Her brothers chose pretty quickly. She took a little longer. By 8:30 they had sat down to carve. By 9:15 I had ONLY traced my stencil and shaded where I knew I needed to carve OUT of the pumpkin. So once I had my stencil...  I set to work. Pinning the stencil to the pumpkin, I SLOWLY and very lightly etched into the pumpkin every line needed for the cut outs. That took about an hour, with the speed I had been carving at. Once that was set, I pulled off the paper and began making the punch outs. That took me until 12:00 AM. So once it was all said and done, I was COVERED in pumpkin shit, and left with a fairly AWESOME Legendary Pumpkin. It's right jaw and the left shield and sword ended up falling apart. I salvaged most of the right jaw with a toothpick, but there was no way to save the sword side. (Opposite sides when you look at it). In any case, about 3-4 hours of work went into prep, production, and clean up. My right hand STILL hurts (we did this Saturday night) from holding the blade at it's VERY tip to etch. Probably didn't help I used my thumb and first two fingers to grip every blade past that in order to carve. Feels like carpal tunnel.  And yes, I bombed the RT staff with it's image. I apologize, BUT- knowing they're big fans of Halo, I wanted to share something I thought was actually very cool. Next year I'm going to do an XBOX Power Symbol, the XBOX Jewel logo, and then probably this again. Or some other stuff. But I'm definitely attempting this again. The only disappointing thing was the learning curve. I haven't carved since I was 10 and even then I didn't REALLY carve anything. Learning to cut at the same angle, cutting steady... they're all things that screwed me in the end, but overall, I think this is pretty fucking sweet. More pictures are in my image gallery! 
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