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Halloween · Print-true

Pumpkin carving stencils

Pick a pattern, choose your paper size and print. There are ten original carving patterns, including a cat, a bat, a ghost, a spooky face and a haunted house, drawn as bold vector shapes and printed at true size from your browser. Every sheet is stamped with what to cut, what to keep and how to transfer it to the pumpkin. There is no watermark across the middle and no sign-up, and nothing you do here leaves your device.

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Sheet— Pattern— Cut area— Pages—
A printable pumpkin carving stencil sheet showing a classic spooky jack-o'-lantern face
A sample sheet from this generator: the spooky face pattern.

How this stencil library works

Each pattern is original geometry, built in code from rectangles, polygons and arcs, and none of it is traced from anyone's artwork. Building from simple shapes is why the patterns come out bold and clean, without fussy detail. No pattern leaves a piece of pumpkin fully surrounded by cuts. The same automated tests that cover this site's puzzles check every pattern in the library for that. The sheet is an SVG drawn in real millimeters. Pick a paper size and margin and the whole pattern resizes to fit inside the margin, keeping its shape and staying out of your printer's dead zone. The "cut area" figure in the readout and on each sheet's stamp shows what share of the design gets cut away. The page works it out by sampling the pattern's geometry on a fine grid.

To use one, print it at 100% scale, tape it to the pumpkin and make a row of pinholes along every black edge. Then peel the paper away and carve from hole to hole. Black areas are cut out and glow, and white stays. The white gaps that run through black shapes are bridges. Each one holds a piece of pumpkin to the rest of the shell, so leave every bridge standing. On the spider web the arcs stop short of the spokes, so every cell of the web stays attached, and on the candy corn the white gaps between the three bands are both the stripes and the bridges. As with every sheet on this site, set the print dialog to 100% or "Actual size". "Fit to page" shrinks the pattern a few percent, and on a stencil that mostly costs you bridge width, the one thing you want more of.

These are single-layer cut stencils: every area is either cut through or left alone. There is no shaved "glow" layer, because surface shaving depends on tools and pumpkin walls that no printout can control. A flat sheet on a round pumpkin always wrinkles a little; a few short cuts in the paper's edges absorb most of it, and once the holes are poked you carve by them.

More pumpkin stencils

Frequently asked questions

How do I transfer a stencil onto the pumpkin?
Print the sheet at 100% scale, trim the excess paper and tape it to the pumpkin. A few short cuts (darts) in the paper's edges let a flat sheet hug a curved surface. Then poke holes through the paper along every black edge with a pin or poking tool, a finger-width apart or closer on tight curves. Peel the paper off and carve dot-to-dot along the holes. A short version of these steps is printed at the foot of every sheet, so it is still there at the kitchen table.
What do the black and white areas mean?
Black is cut away: those are the holes the candle shines through. White stays, because it is the pumpkin. Where a white gap runs through a black shape, that gap is a bridge holding an island of pumpkin in place. The ghost's eyes and the haunted house's windows depend on theirs, so carve up to a bridge and stop. If you cut across one, the piece it holds falls into the pumpkin.
What size pumpkin do these patterns fit?
Each pattern is scaled to fill your paper inside the margin, so a Letter or A4 portrait sheet gives a design roughly 17–19 cm wide, which suits the face of a typical medium carving pumpkin. For a bigger pumpkin, lower the margin and the pattern redraws larger; for a small one, raise the margin, which goes from 5 to 25 mm. Portrait gives the biggest pattern, and landscape prints every pattern smaller. The readout shows the sheet size, and the pattern always scales as one piece, so proportions never distort.
Can I print just one pattern instead of all ten?
Yes. The Pattern menu switches between any single stencil and the full ten-sheet pack. The pack prints one pattern per page in one print job, which is the easy way to let everyone at the table pick. Choosing "Save as PDF" in the print dialog turns the same job into a single ten-page file.
Is anything uploaded or stored?
No. Every pattern is drawn as vector geometry by this page, in your browser, and printed through your browser's own dialog. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is no account or watermark, and no settings are saved. Close the tab and it is gone.

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