Carve Your Pumpkin In Record Time With TikTok's Creative Trick

If you've ever carved pumpkins for Halloween, you know it's an icky-sticky process removing all those ooey-gooey guts from inside it. It's the absolute worst part of the job, but it needs to be done. Yes, pumpkin guts are good for all sorts of things, from face masks to growing new pumpkins, but getting to them is no fun — until now. TikTok user @chickenbrown00 has shown a power-washer trick that can carve your pumpkin and remove the innards all at once in a matter of minutes.

Power washers are amazing tools. There's something incredibly satisfying about watching all the dirt that's accumulated into the grooves of your siding, along the planks of your deck, and all over your patio furniture suddenly be flushed away by a directed flood of water. At their highest settings, they can strip paint and damage a bunch of things, but they're also good at lower settings for more delicate jobs where you don't want to damage the surface of the item you're washing. And apparently, they're good for making carved pumpkins.

Carving out Halloween pumpkins with a pressure washer is not a precision process, so you'll want a decent-sized gourd. Think definitely bigger than your own head. Get a permanent marker and draw the face you want to carve using big, bold shapes and plenty of space in between, like an old-school Jack-o-lantern grimace. You won't be able to see pen or pencil lines through the spray. Furthermore, avoid lots of intricate curves and angles. If your eyes are too close together, or you're trying to cut the appearance of shark teeth into the side of your pumpkin, the pressure washer method might leave you with a big, empty space instead.

Plan your carving session for mild, sunny weather and during the warmest part of the day. Think of it like sitting in the splash zone at a dolphin show: you will get wet. Set your pumpkin on a flat, sturdy surface. The ground works, if it's not too slanted, or an outdoor workbench is another good option. Don't set it on anything that you wouldn't want to potentially be damaged by a high-velocity stream. Make sure your pressure washer is powered up and ready to go, using the zero-degree nozzle and the pressure set mid-range between 1,700 and 2,000 psi. Any lower and it won't work that well; any higher and it might shred your pumpkin to bits.

Stand three feet away and aim the pressure washer at your pumpkin's face, remembering to protect your own with goggles. Go from the top down, both for ease and for an exciting effect at the end, pointing the spray at one of the eyes to start. Working along one of the lines outlining the eye, run your pressure washer spray back and forth until it cuts into the pumpkin. For example, with triangle eyes, move the stream up and down the right line only until done, then the left line and the base. This offers the most precise results. Once the outline is cut, aim the spray exactly at the center of the eye until it pushes the entire shape out the rest of the way.

Move to each shape one by one, doing the mouth last. As you spray away the mouth, all the water inside will come flooding out with a wave of pulp and seeds. For a particularly dramatic effect, add food coloring to your water before beginning to make it look like your pumpkin spits it out. That's it! This won't remove all the guts, so you might need to manually scrape away the remainder, but it will do most of the worst of it for you. In addition, your cuts will look haphazard. It's a more haunted look, for sure, but for clean lines, make some touch-ups with a knife before setting it on the porch.