{"id":4494,"date":"2018-05-11T09:12:43","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T16:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/?p=4494"},"modified":"2018-05-11T09:12:43","modified_gmt":"2018-05-11T16:12:43","slug":"gourd-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/archives\/4494","title":{"rendered":"Gourd art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, I grew some bushel basket gourds with the hopes of making them into drums. The gourds didn’t really get big enough for drums (I’ll try again this year), but I thought I’d use them to practice in the meantime.<\/p>\n

I got a bunch of books from the library to get inspirations for what I might make and to learn the techniques. It’s quite a process.<\/p>\n

First, the gourds need to dry outside for several months. They go from being very heavy to being quite light as they dry.<\/p>\n

This is what the gourds looked like when they were done drying. Those black spots are yucky mold.<\/p>\n

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The next step is to soak them in hot soapy water overnight. You have to weight them down so they don’t float up.<\/p>\n

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Then you scrub the outside of the outside of the gourds with a metal scouring pad to get all the skin and mold off. When I got done and dried them out again, they looked like this:<\/p>\n

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Next I cut open the gourds. Depending on what I was going to make with them I either used a hand keyhole saw or drilled a hole in the top with a hole saw. This is that the insides looked like.<\/p>\n

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I scraped and separated the seeds to save for this year’s growing. Then I scraped out the other dry stuff out and sanded the inside to get it smooth. Then came the fun part, finishing. I stained the outsides with some soy-based wood stain.<\/p>\n

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For one of the gourds, which would have a visible interior, I decoupaged the inside. I used tea bag envelopes and tags, since I was making a tea holder.<\/p>\n

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To finish the outsides, I used acrylic paints and then varnished thewhole thing.<\/p>\n

Here’s the end product. The one of the left is a tea candle holder.<\/p>\n

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Given that this is the first time I’ve done anything like this, I am happy with the end results. I have several more “practice” gourds and am looking forward to experimenting more with these.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year, I grew some bushel basket gourds with the hopes of making them into drums. The gourds didn’t really get big enough for drums (I’ll try again this year), but I thought I’d use them to practice in the meantime. I got a bunch of books from the library to get inspirations for what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[184],"class_list":["post-4494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gourds"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4494"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4502,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4494\/revisions\/4502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kbtechworks.com\/kbranch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}