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Halloween · Print-true

Pumpkin carving stencils

Ten original carving patterns — cat, bat, ghost, spooky face, haunted house and more — 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. No watermark across the middle, no sign-up, and nothing you do here leaves your device.

Sheet— Pattern— Cut area— Pages—

How this stencil library works

Every pattern here is original geometry, constructed in code from rectangles, polygons and arcs rather than traced from anyone's artwork — which is why the shapes are bold and clean instead of fussy. The sheet is SVG in real millimeters: pick a paper size and margin, and the pattern scales as one piece to fill the printable area, so nothing distorts and nothing lands in your printer's dead zone. The "cut area" figure in the readout and on each sheet's stamp is measured, not guessed — the page samples the pattern's geometry on a fine grid and reports what fraction of the design gets cut away, which is a fair proxy for how much sawing a pattern asks of you.

To use one: print at 100% scale, tape the sheet to the pumpkin (short cuts in the paper's edges let it wrap the curve), and poke holes through the paper along every black edge — about a finger-width apart, closer on tight curves. Peel the paper away and carve dot-to-dot: black areas are cut out and glow, white stays. Where a white gap runs through a black shape, that gap is a bridge: it is what holds an island of pumpkin — the ghost's eyes, the haunted house's windows — to the rest of the shell. Every pattern in this library was checked, by the same tests that gate this site's puzzles, to guarantee no piece of pumpkin is left fully surrounded by cuts. Carve up to a bridge and stop.

The honest limits. These are single-layer cut stencils — every area is either cut through or left alone, with no shaved "glow" layer, because surface shaving depends on tools and pumpkin walls no printout can control. A flat sheet on a round pumpkin always wrinkles a little; the darts absorb most of it, and the poked holes, not the paper, are what you carve by. And as with every sheet on this site, the print dialog must be at 100% or "Actual size" — "Fit to page" shrinks the pattern a few percent, and on a stencil that mostly costs you bridge width, which is the one thing you want more of.

The rest of the pumpkin cluster

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. The same instructions are stamped at the foot of every sheet, so they are 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: 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. Never 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 — right for the face of a typical medium carving pumpkin. For a bigger pumpkin, switch to landscape or lower the margin and the pattern redraws larger; for a small one, raise the margin. 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 control 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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