Pump it up

Jack is calling out to you. He’s telling you it’s time to carve your lantern to help you find your way through the darkness of Halloween night.

That is the kind of thinking that guides master pumpkin carver Ed Moody as he carves one of his 1,000-pound monster pumpkins, a stunt that has become his speciality.

"They call me ‘Special Ed’ because the pumpkins talk to me and I talk to them," said Moody. "They tell me all kinds of things — ‘Cut this off, get rid of that.’"

Moody was in Honolulu for last weekend’s Pumpkin Carving Festival at the Neal Blaisdell Center, shipping two 1,000-pound-plus pumpkins and an 800-pound squash here to carve. Every fall for the last 12 years or so, he’s carved giant pumpkins at fairs, schools and other community events, as well as about 15 pumpkins for a display at his own home in Frankfort, Mich.

His advice for prospective pumpkin carvers is commonsense and reassuring.

"The first thing that you can do is pick a shape of pumpkin you like and a color you like," he said. "There’s all kinds of shapes, there’s white ones, there’s yellow ones. There’s flat ones that stack up. There’s really nice round ones."

A pumpkin with a deep furrows might be good for a wrinkled face, he said, while an especially large, rounded pumpkin is good for a jack-o’-lantern with several faces carved into it.

"You might want a tall, teardrop-shaped one to do something with elongated eyes and nose," he said.

Moody recommends getting a pumpkin carving kit, especially if children will be doing the carving.

"They’ll contain scoops and saws and candles and nonsharp cutting tools that won’t cut the skin," Moody said. But he said to avoid knives with small, sharp teeth, preferring instead knives with "deeper, almost rounded serrations about a quarter-inch deep." Moody himself uses a paring knife to do most of the carving, occasionally turning to a boning or a fillet knife.

Safeway stores have kits available for $4.99 that, include cutting tools, patterns and a tool for tracing patterns onto pumpkins.

Pumpkins are on sale for 59 cents a pound, and a 10- to 12-pound pumpkin is a typical size for a good jack-o’-lantern.

Moody’s last bit of advice is to leave your ego behind.

"You have to remember it’s your art, and it can’t be wrong no matter what you do," he said. "That’s the biggest thing that people have a problem with. It’s ‘Oh, I can’t carve a pumpkin, I’m not an artist, I can’t draw a straight line.’ It doesn’t matter. It’s yours."

The jack-o’-lantern tradition stems from an old Irish legend about a mean, cruel man named Jack who tricked the devil into denying him entrance into hell but who was also denied entry into heaven. The devil eventually gave Jack an ember from the flames of hell — which Jack toted in a hollowed-out pumpkin — to provide light in the darkness between heaven and hell.

Moody has been carving pumpkins since childhood, but it wasn’t until he had kids of his own that he came up with the idea to carve a huge pumpkin into a carriage, as in the Cinderella fairy tale. It took him five years to acquire a 590-pound pumpkin, and more than 30 hours to carve "because I was afraid to make a mistake." Now he takes about two to four hours to carve a giant pumpkin.

Moody will sometimes have a face in mind when he carves a pumpkin, especially when asked by his grandson to carve a cartoon character. More often, however, he gets a pumpkin and studies it closely, like a sculptor looking at a stone or piece of wood.

"I’ll look at them from every direction," he said. "On the giants I’ll even stand on top of them and look down at them. … It just depends on what’s in the pumpkin and what jumps out at me."