How to Clean the Inside of a Gourd

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Karen LoCasale and I'm here to tell you about crafting with gourds. How to clean the inside of the gourd. Once you've gotten your gourd cut you will see all the dried out seeds and pulp and it kinda looks like a dried pumpkin on the inside. Again, safety concerns, because of the mold and all the little spores and things you wanna make sure and put your mask on. Also, the eye protection is good too because the dust will get into your eyes as well. A couple of tools that I use to clean. I like to use a good melon baller, just any old kitchen utensils that you're going to use strictly just for your gourds. Ceramic cleaning tools work really well. Another good thing when you're doing bowls and you have a really large area, this is something you can get at the hardware store, it's an extension for your regular drill, and then the little wire wheels that they have at the hardware store. These come in many different configurations and sizes, fits in your drill and that gets in there real well to work on those bowl areas. When you have smaller areas like this then we can just use our hand tools. I'll go ahead an put on my mask and my glasses and you just scrape away. It does take some time, you want to get down to the actual bare gourd in there, you want to get rid of all of this white, all of the seeds, as much of it as you can. And again you can see how very fine all that dust is so that's why you want to use a really good mask to keep that out of your breathing and keep that out of your eyes."