Meanwhile @danilamarilu is a billion times quicker than me and already has her Happy Love Pumpkin finished. With glitter sparkles that she added all around the heart eyes and mouth. http://i.imgur.com/PD53yva.jpg Time to start carving! Cutting up my template into little pieces in the process. http://i.imgur.com/rR5ITv2.jpg Looking pretty creepy already. Would be even creepier if this were human flesh peeling off someones face! http://i.imgur.com/HXPOCYo.jpg So my Skull pumpkin had some difficulties along the way. I pressed to hard on the big pieces I was carving out, causing it to tear at the eyes and mouth! This discouraged me a lot and I ended up not carving out the swords on the original template design. I kept torn pieces intact with tooth picks to try to keep it together until Halloween. Here are the reasons it tore: A) As you can see in the template design, there was not enough pumpkin support to hold up the eyes and mouth. There needed to be more width on the pumpkin supporting those areas. B) When I was removing the biggest pieces of the pumpkin, I tried to remove them by pushing them out in one big piece. Now I see that this was a mistake and I should have cut up those parts I was removing into little pieces before pushing it out. http://i.imgur.com/TREhH89.jpg Halloween day has come and The Happy Love Pumpkin is already looking fabulous with candles lighting it up from the inside. http://i.imgur.com/uZ7vOCt.jpg By the time Halloween came my pumpkin was rotting very rapidly. With little black pieces inside and the eyes and mouth were shriveling up to very small sizes. Afterwards I learned that spraying bleach on the pumpkin helps preserve it. Lessons Learned for Future Pumpkin Carving 1) The template I used was good but had to use a stencil at the end because it was not holding together after cutting it so much. 2) Whenever anyone is making a pumpkin design that is mostly hollow, always cut up the big pieces that you are removing into smaller ones before removing them. This will prevent the other parts of the pumpkin from tearing when removing those big pieces. 3) If you are carving your pumpkin several day before Halloween remember to use some form of preservative, like bleach spray or petroleum jelly. This prevents it from decaying as fast as it usually would. This is especially helpful if you carved tiny little pieces for your pumpkin like I did. Don't be like a torn decaying pumpkin like skully , be like the Happy Love Pumpkin instead! http://i.imgur.com/04aOEZV.jpg Happy Halloween! Check out Part 2 of My Halloween Adventure- Trippy Hippy Costume! https://img1.steemit.com/0x0/http://dirtyimg.com/image/DSCN8390.JPG If you like all the content I create then please upvote, resteem & follow my blog @ballinconscious, Thanks! Image/Source Credits: All Image taken by @ballinconscious and @danilamarilu / https://postimg.org/image/pv6elmdu9/