Ok, it’s been a while since I made a blog post (school + freelance has been keeping me crazy busy). There’s nothing like an 8 hour pumpkin carving session to relieve a little stress though! Here’s our official 2009 submission to the Houston’s restaurant pumpkin carving contest. More details on the process after the jump, but here’s the images:
What’s hard to see in these photos is the feat of engineering required to turn a pumpkin into the hull of a boat. We seriously spent hours (and several pumpkin patches) this year to find the right one. The final selection was a “fairytale” variety, which is extremely large and flat, which gave us the proper narrow profile to begin the hull.
The other major challenge was the final assembly (where the masts need to drive into a now hollow hull). We ended up carving out a series of planks on the top, affixing them to the hull, and then attaching the masts and rigging. Alaire had some project-saving ideas that kept this one from being a pile of random pumpkin parts on the floor last night 
We nearly gave up a few times just because it seemed impossible, but she totally saved the day. Looking at it now though makes it seem like a cakewalk. I don’t envy anyone else trying to turn a pumpkin into something it wasn’t meant for. Leave the carving to me, but the engineer is 100% Alaire.
That thing is literally ridiculous. Awesome job Brandon and Alaire.