Carving pumpkins with a knife is so 1950s. With a knife, you are risking your fingers, and you can never get accurate cuts. If you are trying to cut anything but the most basic pumpkin pattern, a knife makes it really hard to get good curves and cuts that are smaller than the thickness of the blade. This year, instead of using a knife to carve your pumpkins, try using a Dremel tool. You can get cuts that are much more accurate. And for those fancy pumpkin carving patterns that require you to remove a portion of the skin (so that the pumpkin looks white in that area, and it glows when lit from inside), this is very easily done when you are using a Dremel tool on your pumpkin.

If you do use your Dremel tool to carve your pumpkin, make sure that you cover up your tool so that it doesn't get covered in pumpkin guts. I take a large zip-loc bag and put the tool in it so that the cutting tip comes out the corner of the bag. I then tape the bag down to Dremel tool so that there are no loose pieces of the bag that can get caught in the tool.

Happy Halloween!