Contains twenty easy projects using gourds to create candleholders, a birdhouse, drinking cups, bracelets, and bowls.

New in Paper With a simple gourd, it's easy to make an astonishing variety of bowls, boxes, baskets, pitchers, and dippers, as well as musical instruments and toys. Choose from the many inviting shapes, from the kettle to the canteen, the bushel basket to the snake. Carve, burn, wax, varnish, and color them with paints, dyes, oils, and markers to work their smooth, three-dimensional surfaces. Basic, time-tested techniques for making practical works of art show you how to grow, dry, and clean them, or where to buy gourds readymade for projects such as a child's elephant pull toy, planters, lamps, and birdhouses. "[A] collection of uncomplicated, step-by-step projects for...large gourds, which are fun to work with and readily available...a good selection."--Library Journal

Step-by-step instructions explain how to complete a variety of projects using gourds of all shapes and sizes.

A guide to gourd pyrography--using heat to create works of gourd art--that discusses gourd prep and work basics, provides step-by-step instructions for several designs and techniques, and presents secrets from fifty artists.

What did Americas first inhabitants use for cooking and eating? What did the stranded characters of television's Gilligan's Island use to prepare and eat food? \nTaking her cue from these questions, author Angela Mohr demonstrates how to create authentic vessels by using gourds. A watering can, cooking utensils, and bowls are created in this step-by-step instruction book, as Mohr brings fun and authenticy to her gourds. \nHistorical re-enactors will find inspiration fhere for their authentic life-style performances and drama students, the rights tools to pursue their craft.

Humankind has had a long and intimate association with gourds, and one of them, the bottle gourd, or calabash, may have been man's first cultivated plant. Although grown in the United States today primarily as ornamentals, in other parts of the world gourds have many other important uses. With charming text and stunning black-and-white photographs, The Gourd Book provides fascinating scientific information and folklore about these remarkable plants and keys for identifying species. The first part of the book deals with tree gourds, widely used as containers and for decoration; the Cucurbita gourds, including the buffalo gourd, the Turk's turban, the silver-seed gourd, and the Malabar gourd, all utilized as food, and the beautiful ornamental gourds; the loofah gourds, popular as cosmetic sponges; minor gourds, such as the snake, wax, bitter, teasel, and hedgehog, sometimes used as food or medicine; and gourds mentioned in the Bible. The second part takes up the bottle gourd, which has been used for thousands of years. Even today this gourd is almost indispensable in many parts of the tropics, where species are used to make containers, musical instruments, and clothing, as food and medicine, and in art. The book concludes with a discussion of the gourd in folklore and myth and an appendix on growing, hybridizing, and preserving gourds for decoration. Delightfully written for general readers, this book will also appeal to botanists, anthropologists, horticulturists, and everyone interested in plants or gardening.

Provides examples from twenty artists along with information on their tools, methods, and influences.