Adding Final Touches to Gourd Art

Video Transcript

"On behalf of Expert Village my name is Karen LoCasale and I'm here to tell you about crafting with gourds. Finishing your gourd once you've got your gourd the way you want it, you have your coloring on there certainly what you don't want to do is loose any of the coloring to fading so you want to try to avoid that as much as possible. So a good acyclic spray over your piece will protect it from dust but it would also help preserve your coloring as well. It is best to do many coats, light coats versus going on with a heavy coat. If you go with a heavy coat if you go with a heavy coat you can get some running and you certainly don't want that to ruin your piece. So a nice light coats of acrylic sealer to seal that color in there. You can also use on the inside if you got something open like this to again seal that color and just for dusting, cleaning purposes just kind of finishes your piece off and you can decide whether if you want your piece to be shiny or dull, mate finish or satin. There is a lot of different product out there for that, so however you want your finish piece to actually look. Another thing to keep, to consider is if your are doing like a bird house or a mask of this sort where you are going to be hanging the piece somewhere you can just add a simple piece of wire onto the back of it. In this case I wrapped the wire onto a couple of the feathers, you can also drill little holes in the gourd and put the wire in through that way. If this was going to be hanging as a bird feeder again you can drill a hole through here, string you know either a string or rope off something of that sort to hang it. A piece such as this where you have a very small piece that is going to be a necklace sort of thing it is nice to either paint the back of it or in this case I put a felt backing on this to keep your dust down. To just finish your piece off so it looks nice on the back you don't see all of your little mistakes and you know dribbles of paint and that sort of thing to have a nice finished piece and makes it look a little more quality. "