Hello, lovely blog readers!

Halloween is my favorite time of year. It’s the only time when the rest of the world shares my love of costumes, everything smells like cinnamon and pumpkins — and suddenly it’s totally normal to do things like getting lost in fields of corn and scooping the innards out of a pumpkin!

My family was diligent about carving pumpkins together each year, and that’s a tradition I’ve carried on with me into my adult life. But I’ve never been a “scary face” jack-o-lantern type of girl… no, I’ve been making geeky pumpkins since my parents trusted me with my own knife. While I’m now a big fan of drawing my own pattern, I definitely used to look them up online before I had any idea how to do it myself.

In the past I’ve made Harry Potter Pumpkins, Lumpy Space Pumpkins, and this year I’m planning to figure out how to get Sailor Moon’s face on there. Maybe. We’ll see.

However! If you’re a bit artistically challenged (no judgement here!) Nintendo has graciously offered these sweet Mario templates for video game nerds to geek out with their… seeds out? That joke sort of got away from me there. Anyway we’ve got Bowser, Boo and Shy Guy for you to pick from: If you decide to use any of these templates, let me know! Or, if you design your own original geeky pumpkin, please send me a picture! I would love to see what you create. Send me an @reply on Twitter, you know my username!