If you bought any craft pumpkins on clearance after Halloween last year, here’s the perfect project. If you didn’t, well…that was silly of you. Keep this in mind for next Halloween.

The Merrythought did a neat tutorial for Design*Sponge for carving constellations in Jack-o’-Lanterns. I love how restrained and elegant they look.

Their method uses real pumpkins, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t do the same thing with craft foam pumpkins like Funkins. As they suggest, you could do one or more small pumpkins with one constellation each, or carve several constellations into a larger pumpkin.

They suggest spray-painting the pumpkins black, and that’s certainly the most dramatic presentation (it has the added benefit of making the “stars” look like they’re hanging in midair when the lights are out); you could also paint them white and use purple or blue lights for better contrast.

Drilling holes and etching straight lines is refreshingly easy, so even those of us without any pumpkin-carving mojo should be able to play along. It’d be fun to do the zodiac constellations of family members, or a set of them associated with a particular myth (such as Orion and his dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor).