In her garage off Bixby Street in Sapulpa, Karrah Youngblood is carving a likeness of NPR’s Steve Inskeep into a pumpkin.
“See, he’s looking a little less like Hannibal Lecter now. He does still look really weird, though. We’re getting there.”
As she fiddles with her 97-cent pumpkin carving knife, Youngblood explains that she grew up in rural Oklahoma. Every year her family carved a Halloween pumpkin. She continued that tradition into adulthood. At first, Youngblood used other people’s patterns. Then she tried leveling up.
“You know what? I’m a graphic designer. I do not need to be buying somebody else’s patterns, so I started to try and design these patterns, these easy cutouts, and I wasn’t a good enough graphic designer at the time.”
Eventually Youngblood tried a system based on midtones, highlights, and shadows. She designed a template for Patrick Swayze without really knowing if it was going to look good. Using a thumbtack, she mapped his image onto a pumpkin. Then she went to work with her cheap knife and a wood gouge.
“I think Patrick Swayze had just died, and I start doing it, and I’m trusting the process, and it’s looking nothing like Patrick Swayze, and I stuck a light in it and I’m like, ‘Holy crap, he’s looking at me.’”
Youngblood reveals her work online in a unique way. She first shows the pumpkins with the lights on. It’s hard to tell what you’re seeing. When she turns the lights off, the effect is shocking, like with Inskeep. After Youngblood finishes carving and turns off the lights in her garage, his face jumps out from the pumpkin.
She got the idea after she sent a pumpkin reveal video to her group chat to show them the difference.
“My friend Tammy that I’ve known since elementary, she’s like, ‘Karrah, I cannot stop watching this, this is magic,’ and so it gave me the idea to post it on TikTok.”
Youngblood’s videos have racked up more than 20 million views. She signed a contract with NYX Cosmetics to carve their logo into a pumpkin. In gratitude, she's sharing a free Taylor Swift pumpkin carving template on her website.
The best feeling is being taken seriously by other creative people, she says, like when she got a bunch of compliments after finishing Taylor Swift.
“I was standing in my kitchen, I just started bawling. It was just overwhelming, the nice things that were being said, and I’m like, ‘They’re not being said about my face, they’re not being said about my car, they’re being said about something I created.’”