Oct 252010
 

Leading up to Halloween, I thought I’d share some of the pumpkin creations that our lab creates for our annual departmental pumpkin carving contest. We’re lucky to belong to a department full of competitive and talented pumpkin carvers, so we’ve needed to up our game every year, resulting in some pretty cool pumpkin designs. We generally make an evening of it, with all the available grad students, undergrad volunteers, post-docs, lab managers, etc joining in and making some ent-o-lanterns!

2007 was my first Halloween as a grad student, and the pumpkin carving really started to take off:

Jack-o-Lantern of Jumping Spider Pumpkin Insect

Jumping Spider Jack-o-Lantern Pumpkin Insect

Composed of 3 pumpkins (one each for the cephalothorax and abdomen, and one carved into legs), we used the bottoms of popcans to recreate the globular shining eyes, and small peelings of pumpkin skin embedded into the parts for bristles. The “bristles” actually dried out over night, curling and appearing more life-like. Time for completion? 8+hours with 5 grad students.

  16 Responses to “Ent-o-Lantern – 2007”

  1. Haha I love the lanterns that you guys make every year, can’t wait to see what happens this time!

  2. I have never seen something like this in my past and I would like to congratulate on making such a beautiful thing. Since I am a big fan of spiders so I am glad to have found your post and have a chance to take a look at your masterpiece. It looks like a jumping spider but I am not very sure. Those who are interested to know about these jumping spiders should visit jumpingspider.net.

Leave a Reply to Ted C. MacRae Cancel reply

(required)

(required)

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>