Looking for easy ways to decorate your home for Halloween? Of course, we recommend using pumpkins, but this year we suggest avoiding the standard Jack-o-Lantern and using these beautiful examples as inspiration for something simple and stylish:

Last year, we had a pumpkin carving contest here at Tiny Prints that brought out the creativity in all of us. In fact, there wasn’t a single traditional jack-o-lantern in the bunch!

The winning design was this intricate carving of an underwater scene:

We still aren’t sure how the winning team managed to make such a cool design, but we also had a few more seasonal pumpkin characters that you and your family could easily replicate this year:

To make this charming black cat:

• Carve cat eyes into a small pumpkin that will serve as the head
• Use black spray paint to cover the head, one large pumpkin as the body, a pair of small pumpkins as paws and a zucchini as the tail.
• Attach paper ears and use wood skewers as whiskers.
• Light a candle and place it inside the cat’s head to see it’s eyes glow!

To make a pumpkin owl:

• Scoop out the inside of the pumpkin
• Carve V-shaped feathers into the owl’s chest and reserve two V’s to attach to the owl’s head as ears
• Drill two holes into the face of the pumpkin and attach two small pumpkins as eyes. If the stems of the small pumpkins aren’t long enough to stay in the drilled hole (like ours were!), secure them to the back of the pumpkin using wood skewers.
• Use leftover pumpkin chunks from either the top of the pumpkin or the V-shaped feathers as feet and a little beak
• Add a Tootsie Pop for a charming finishing touch!

Plus, if you’re hosting a pumpkin carving party of your own, don’t forget to send cute Halloween party invitations to match!