Last year, we created jack-o-lantern templates based on our Oog charmer necklaces — they’re cute, they’re spooky and perfect for Hallowe’en.

At our house, we went a little more personalized with our pumpkins and created Scary Eric, Scary Vivian and Scary Jr. VP jack-o-lanterns. Scary Eric and Scary Jr. VP are shown below:

To make the template, I started with a photo and drew on top of it in Illustrator until you get something like this:

For this year’s pumpkins, I’ll be attempting a very geeky jack-o-lantern that’s very much like our QR code jewelry, and here’s the template I’ll be using:

To use the template:

1) Click on the image and you’ll be taken to a full-size version.

2) Right-click the full-size template and “Save image as”, to save the template to your computer

3) Print out your image and re-scale as necessary.

4) Tape or pin the template to your pumpkin. You can use a pin to mark the outlines and then connect the dots of the outline.  (The black areas should just be shallow chiseling that doesn’t go all the way through to the inside of pumpkin).

Wish me luck! It’s more geeky than scary, but it does encode a spooky message ;)
If you try out this template, I’d love to see how it works out for you!

Update:
Here is the carved pumpkin. It turns out, it does scan! (Eric was able to scan it using ScanLife and Scan apps on the iPod — it helps if you’ve got decent lighting). The photo below will also scan if you have some mad Photoshop skillz: