Glow Shtick

Forget toothy-grinned jack-o'-lanterns. One lesson from Professor Patty Pumpkin and you'll be the envy of the cul-de-sac. Instead of cutting, Patty Christyson-Clark spends two hours peeling away flesh with her Ray Villafane carving loops. "The hardest part is the depth because if you start hacking away, you can't tell where to stop," she says. "I do it until it gets stringy." As she outlines a Cleveland cityscape, she opines on preventing pumpkin rot (an 8-hour bath of 1 teaspoon of bleach in 1 gallon of cold water followed by a Vaseline rub) and beginner material (butternut squash, because "if you mess up, they're delicious"). Since 2005, she's been transforming pumpkins into creations such as gorillas and owls. She teaches pumpkin carving classes at Mapleside Farms Oct. 4, 5, 11, 12, 25 and 26, a gig she got by showing her business card sculpted — you guessed it — into a pumpkin. "The only sad part is they don't last," she says. "I enjoy them and then I let them go." Mapleside Farms, 294 Pearl Road, Brunswick, 330-225-5577, mapleside.com