Project of the Week

This gourd was kind of a fail. I watched a you-tube video of a guy in Hawaii who peeled off part of the skin of a gourd, and then filled the gourd with a stain (like coffee.) The stain in the gourd is supposed to "color" the remaining skin while the rest of the gourd dries naturally.

I painstakingly tried it with about 10 green gourds and an Exacto knife. I filled them all with green dye, and had to keep refilling them because the gourd kept absorbing the dye.

The Hawaii guys gourds were gorgeous...real works of art that I'm sure he sells for a pretty penny in his gallery. Mine? Not so much. They didn't dry like they were supposed to. In this gourd, for instance...about half of the butterflies turned a nice dark color, but the other half stayed light brown like the rest of the dried gourd.

My solution was to paint all the butterflies in a Monarchy way, and to paint the top to match.

A fail? Maybe not. Just a different outcome.