Carve great pumpkins with these 10 out-of-your-gourd ideas

Toothy grin, triangle eyes, lighted candle. Meh.

Sometime between the first pumpkin face, carved by the first mischievous child, and the 20 millionth Halloween pop-up store, the whole jack-o-lantern thing got a bit old. There's only so many ways you can carve a smile into a vegetable. Right?

Linus, in the "Peanuts" strip, used to await The Great Pumpkin. Most of us, when Oct. 31 rolls around, settle for the merely adequate pumpkin. Or — let's face it — the pretty boring pumpkin.

Maybe it's time to start thinking outside the gourd.

"It's amazing how many variations of a classic jack-o-lantern can be done," said Marc Evan, co-founder of Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, a New York-based consortium of master pumpkin sculptors who create designer squash for weddings, corporate events, even for the Metropolitan and Whitney museums of art. They also host classes for novice carvers.

"Beginners can do some really great sculpted pumpkins," Evan said. "I see it every year."

Pumpkin carving, as you may know, goes back to the Old World. In centuries past, faces would be carved into hollowed-out turnips and rutabagas.

Candles, placed inside, would turn them into lanterns. Called "jack o' lanterns," in honor of the will-o-the-wisp — also known, then, as "jack o' lantern" — a ghostly phosphorescence sometimes seen in the boggy areas of Great Britain and Ireland on autumn nights. Spooky. And perfect for Samhain — the basis for our Halloween. The night when the dead hobnob with the living.

But turnips were edible — therefore valuable. Pumpkins less so (back in the day, they were mostly food for livestock, not humans). So in America, where pumpkins are plentiful, they became the jack o' lantern of choice.

For a while, the mere fact of a face carved in a pumpkin was enough to startle. But now, alas, we've become jaded. A grinning pumpkin is about as surprising, now, as a new "pumpkin spice" confection.

The good news is that there are ways to up your pumpkin game. There are carving kits, stencils, and sculpting tools available for those who want to tap their inner Rodin. If you're feeling really ambitious, you could even take a class with Maniac Pumpkin Carvers.

But meanwhile, here are a few simple hacks that will automatically make your pumpkin more interesting.

Use the stem as a nose

Who says the stem is the top of the pumpkin?

Turn your gourd on its side, and you'll find the stem makes a great schnozz. And stems, like noses, come in all sorts of shapes. Sawn-off stems make cute button noses. Longer protuberances make for great Cyrano de Bergerac honkers. Gesundheit!

Use the innards as hair

That stringy, gunky stuff that comes out of the inside of the pumpkin doesn't have to be wrapped in newspaper and thrown away.

Who's to say that you pumpkin isn't a lady? And who's to say that she isn't immensely proud of her long, flaxen hair. Arrange it on the top, and give her a coiffure!

Another beauty tip: the insides of the pumpkin also make great vomit. A cascade of it, flowing out of your jack o' lantern's mouth, will charm the neighborhood.

Use unusual lighting

It's better the light a candle than to curse the darkness. Better still to forego them both — and light your pumpkin with LED lights. You can get your pumpkin to glow purple or green. You can get it to flash and strobe. It's safer. And cooler!

Make a pumpkin totem pole

A pumpkin pileup, like a traffic pileup, is something you just can't look away from. You can delight the neighborhood rubberneckers by stacking one on top of the other on top of other, until you create a vast tower of pumpkin. A squashscraper, if you will.

Give it arms, and legs (or tentacles)

There's no end of the accessories you can create for your pumpkin with a bunch of oddly-shaped gourds.

A couple of long thin ones, sticking out of either side, can be arms. Some long curvy ones, arrayed around the bottom, can be tentacles. A couple of little round ones, on either side of the forehead, can be amphibian eyes. The only limits are your creepy imagination!

Use a cookie cutter

Do you bake? Do you have cookie cutters in the house?

For this simple hack, you'll need them, and a hammer. Just pound your aluminum stars, squares and hexagons (not too hard) into the side of the pumpkin, and you can create all kinds of designs that will look way cool when lit from within.

Create a Dio de los Muertos scene

Use your pumpkin as a stage — and create a miniature world within. Just carve away the whole front of the vegetable, leaving a big open space. Create a tiny diorama within, using matchstick men, repurposed toy soldiers, whatever you can devise. Then light it from the top, with LED lights, and voila! — a Halloween scene!

Have your pumpkin devour another pumpkin

Pumpkins are known cannibals. They think nothing of taking another pumpkin life. Ask anyone.

You can illustrate this well-known tendency by carving an enormous, wedge-like mouth, and then cramming one of those small pumpkin-like gourds into one side of it. Ewwwwww!

Drill, baby, drill!

Why use a knife to carve a pumpkin, when you can use a power tool? With the right size drill bit (large) to create all kinds of pretty patterns.

Beware the perfect pumpkin

If it's beautiful, round, and perfectly proportioned, leave it in the patch. Let the chumps think they've made a great find. You know better.

You want the weirdly-shaped, oddly colored, strange looking pumpkin — the one you can do interesting things with. Best of all are the ones with weird lumps and bulges in them. The ones that look like they have a disease. Perfect!

"You want to pick out a unique shape — one that has some character even before you cut it," Evan said. "When you go to the farm, you can find some really good shapes. Some are taller, some are squatter. Sometimes we really like to pick the ones that are like the store rejects. A pumpkin that's really lumpy might be the perfect monster shape."

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Carve great pumpkins with these 10 out-of-your-gourd ideas