Bring new direction and inspiration to your gourd crafts by adding motion! Gourd art is often stationary--either elaborately decorated items of beauty or practical tools--and introducing motion breaks the world of gourd crafts wide open. Using small gourds and easily accessible tools and supplies, learn to make your gourd projects spin, jump, and more! Clear instructions and step-by-step photos teach how to generate four basic types of movement in any project: spinning, jumping, up and down, and rise and drop. Create a flock of moving flamingos, kinetic sculptures, a human in a swaying rowboat, spinners that create optical illusions, a duck that waddles complete with flapping sounds, and many more. Written with beginners in mind, these ideas provide inspiration for modern gourd crafters to explore new, dynamic, and active avenues for their creative talents.

Jim Widess and Ginger Summit, the best-selling authors of The Complete Book of Gourd Craft and Making Gourd Instruments, have done it again: they’ve produced another winner to delight the many crafters who work with gourds. Large, lavish, and astonishingly comprehensive, this breathtaking volume introduces every tool and every technique associated with gourd carving, offers fabulous projects that advance in difficulty, and presents a gallery of works designed to inspire. See how to choose and prepare a gourd, impress the surface with a design, and work with green gourds. The magnificent methods of decorative carving covered include fretwork, engraving, chip carving, carving with gouges, relief carving, inlay, and deep relief or sculptural carving. Throughout, color photographs of exquisite carved gourds present crafts styles from countries around the world. A Selection of the Crafters Choice Book Club.

The Kogi Indians of the Sierra Nevada, an isolated mountain massif of northern Colombia, have preserved much of their cultural heritage, notwithstanding the onslaught of outside influences. To the casual observer their austere and withdrawn way of life presents a picture of abject poverty but long-term ethnological study reveals dimensions of inner depth which are evidence of a very rich and cherished tradition going back to pre-Conquest times. Kogi cosmogony and cosmology, their religious philosophy, and their interpretation of nature, as described by men of priestly training, bear witness to a creative imagination of great power. This study tells us of their macrocosm and microcosm; the structure of the universe and the spinning of cotton thread; time-space concepts and the symbolism of a small gourd vessel; biological cycles and temple architecture, and all this within the compass of a sacred mountain which to the Kogi is the centre of the universe. The ethnological importance of this essay is equalled by its value to the Humanities, and opens a new dimension of Amerindian studies.

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

"An overview of the ... history of Apache chief Geronimo, with a look at the timeless strategies we can learn from his life, from ... football coach Mike Leach"--

Gourds -- with their infinite variety of unusual shapes and sizes, and their smooth surfaces -- have provided a perfect canvas for artists in the American Southwest over many years. It's easy to carve, paint, and stain them, and add embellishments like beads and feathers. These beautiful projects, including rainsticks, masks, and bowls, reflect the traditional designs, techniques, and colors that are indigenous to this region.