We’ve started the annual pumpkin project early

Every year we always feel SO rushed doing the pumpkin project, because pumpkins aren’t available around here til the very end of September and we want the video to be out by late October or early November, AND we want sufficient time (ideally multiple weeks) to see if the pumpkin would rot. This year, we had some small scale tests we wanted to do first (I’ll get to those in a sec) so we decided you know what, let’s just do them now but with squash!!

Before I get ahead of myself though, here’s the plan for this year’s pumpkin. We had narrowed our ideas to a) freeze drying it, or b) trying a technique where we pour the resin ALL at once (instead of layers) and do another cube, encasing it fully in resin sooner than the 8 or so days it took last time doing it layer by layer. Based on how much detail I went into on option a and b, you can probably guess we moved forward with b. We like both ideas, but option b felt like a more natural progression after last year’s attempt. Oh, and how are we gonna pour the resin all at once without dealing with thermal runaway? We’re gonna put it in a fridge, which we saw BM Sculptures do on his channel (this video: https://youtu.be/Z5UJrqElR-U) So we bought a “resin fridge” (things I never thought I’d say…) and we plan to try pouring gallons of resin all at once.

But that’s not the only thing we’re doing differently, which brings us to the small scale squash test. We just started a “sanitization” test due to so many comments suggesting we spray the pumpkin down with bleach or alcohol right after carving it, to slow the decomposition process.

So we grabbed some large spaghetti squash to use as samples, sprayed one section with 99% alcohol, one with household bleach straight from the jug, one with household bleach diluted according to the instructions on the jug, and one as a control with nothing sprayed on it. I’m excited to see how these turn out!! -K