Scraping before gutting ...is it possible?

[Carving Queen]

I have 12 pumpkins so far and 1 week until Halloween. Is it possible to do scraped designs now and gut the precious babies closer to Halloween night?

Will gutting later affect the design.... will the scraped areas dry and seal up the outside to prevent rot?

[CombichristGirl]

even after gutting shaded patterns hold up much better and longer than cutouts. just depending on how you gut (IE pumpkin gutter or something else heavy duty) just be a little more careful not to get to thin. if you were to go thin a pice of the shading may get messed up or shine oddly


so after all that..i dont see why not?
let us know the results if you have or do try!
im trying to come up with a plan of attack as well lol

[YoshioKun13]

I have 12 pumpkins so far and 1 week until Halloween. Is it possible to do scraped designs now and gut the precious babies closer to Halloween night?

That's the way I'm going about it!

Figured it would be a wise idea to just scrape away the areas early on, wait until a little closer to the night at hand to gut and cut and hope it all stays intact. Unlike LAST year, where I gutted a bunch of 'em FIRST, very early on and waited until the night before H-ween to carve out my designs. By that time, I had a batch of mushy, useless piles of pumpkin goo and another batch that were headed in that direction.

So yeah, if you've got scrape-away parts I would start with those on the outside surface before gutting and cutting.

[Carving Queen]

Well ... I did my first scraping yesterday (saving a few cut out parts for later) and so far so good. The scraped areas have sort of dried over and resealed the pumpkin ...so I am going to go for pumpkin #2 today!

I just worry that with 12 pumpkins I might not leave myself enough time to gut!!

[Chewy]

Unless you're super slow at gutting you should be ok to bang out 12 in a few hours. A pumpkin gutter helps though - I've gutted four of our crop this year now that I have one & have it down to something like 5 or 6 minutes to do a gutting, thinning & a manual cleanup scrape. Slick as goose poop!