Making stuff look pixelated is easier than it might seem. Tracing the stencil is easy because you only need to mark corners (the letter 'u' has 9 corners total). Once all of the corners are marked the stencil can be removed and you just cut straight lines between each point. The difficult part comes more from just having to work really really carefully. Unlike more organic shapes you can't really fix a mistake with "pixels".
also, i never managed to ford a river without getting my rear kicked.
Glad to see your pumpkins are back!