Gourd Bowl

What do you do with a nice thick Canteen Gourd?

I decided to make a pair of bowls from it by cutting it in half, then sanding the inside smooth, and then drawing on designs that I wood burned in, then used leather dyes to color.

This is the first of the two bowls, wood burned and leather dye colored both inside and outside.

The bowl is 9 inches across and is 3/8 inches thick.

Click on photographs to enlarge for a better view.

Inside view

Outside view

Geometric Designs and Gems

Gourd Art # 108

Today's post is of another Gourd Art I just finished after working on it for the past two weeks.

The Gourd is a nice Big one,finished it stands 13 1/2 inches tall and is 12 inches wide at it's widest part, and did manage to give me quite a challenge to create it.

The Gourd is not fully round, as most gourds are not, and has a somewhat bulbous shape which lends it's self to a storage type gourd (to keep things in it).

I started out by first drawing on some Geometric Designs and then wood burning the designs in, and then cutting the diamond shaped pieces of top grade Lapis to be inlaid into the upper boarder portion. There are 22 diamond shaped pieces inlaid into the upper boarder and then a boarder around each piece wood burned in and colored with a special Sliver paint.

I then proceeded to color in all the Geometric Designs with leather dye, then there was one slightly bad spot just below the upper boarder in the gourd, so I designed another Geometric Design there and cut another piece of Lapis to be inlaid in that spot where it was pitted.

The next challenge was the top that I had cut off, it had some deep cracks and gouges in it,I filled those places and then drew on a ribbon type design, wood burned it in, then colored with leather dye.

Finished Gourd Art

View from the top

The troublsome top before

Showing top after

Signed bottom