Tips for Burning Designs on Gourds

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Karen LoCasale and I'm here to tell you about crafting with gourds. Burning your design on the gourd, this is a good thing when your using leather dyes and that sort of thing. If you're not going to use a permanent marker to mark your design on there, some of the dyes and things you can use are going to wipe off your design. So, burning it on there will permanently etch it into your gourd and then you can decide from that point if you want to paint if your going to use dyes or what you want to do with it. You can go as simple as the basic wood burning tip that you get at the regular craft stores. I think these run for about nine bucks. Walmart or any of the craft stores have these. Just a basic one tip kind of thing, or you can buy the more expensive ones where you have the options for the different tip designs to do fine lines or shading or the fatter lines and get a lot more variety with these but it's certainly not necessary for beginners. You also have a temperature control on these as well so you can back off your temperature a little bit or make it hotter. A couple of different options but again you can always just do with the basic. Again, you still want to use your mask. Burning the gourd is pretty smelly and again it can be a respiratory problem so it's a good thing to use your mask."