History of Gourds & Gourd Art

Series Summary

Gourd art, or gourd decorating, is an ancient tradition among many countries and indigenous populations. Artists will paint on the shell of dried gourds, and may also process the gourd by carving, sanding, burning or dying the gourd to enhance their work of art. Once thought to be only a craft, gourd art has developed into a featured art form in some areas of the country and has been the subject of home and garden television shows and several art galleries and magazines. You can find the oldest running gourd festival in North Carolina, and the American Gourd Society in Kokomo, Indiana.

In this free video series, our expert will demonstrate how to make gourd art. She will give instructions on how to create several gourd crafts. She offer tips on how to cut into a gourd, how to clean out the inside of the gourd, and shows you how to decorate gourds through several methods. You'll learn how to draw, paint, and scorch your own unique designs into gourds.

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Karen LoCasale and I'm here to tell you about crafting with gourds. Gourds have been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Indians were the first to use them and use them as vessels, mainly. The gourds that I work with are not edible, like your pumpkin or your ornamental gourds. So, what that means is that the insides of them are dried out, the meat is not something that can be ate. So, they're used for bowls, they're used for containing water, canteens, cooking vessels, that sort of thing, storage vessels. They're dried out, you clean the insides of them out and if you're going to use them for water they do have a bitter taste to them so what they would do is fill them with water, drain it, and continue to do that several times until they get that bitterness out. "