Contains twenty easy projects using gourds to create candleholders, a birdhouse, drinking cups, bracelets, and bowls.

What did Americas first inhabitants use for cooking and eating? What did the stranded characters of television's Gilligan's Island use to prepare and eat food? \nTaking her cue from these questions, author Angela Mohr demonstrates how to create authentic vessels by using gourds. A watering can, cooking utensils, and bowls are created in this step-by-step instruction book, as Mohr brings fun and authenticy to her gourds. \nHistorical re-enactors will find inspiration fhere for their authentic life-style performances and drama students, the rights tools to pursue their craft.

Humankind has had a long and intimate association with gourds, and one of them, the bottle gourd, or calabash, may have been man's first cultivated plant. Although grown in the United States today primarily as ornamentals, in other parts of the world gourds have many other important uses. With charming text and stunning black-and-white photographs, The Gourd Book provides fascinating scientific information and folklore about these remarkable plants and keys for identifying species. The first part of the book deals with tree gourds, widely used as containers and for decoration; the Cucurbita gourds, including the buffalo gourd, the Turk's turban, the silver-seed gourd, and the Malabar gourd, all utilized as food, and the beautiful ornamental gourds; the loofah gourds, popular as cosmetic sponges; minor gourds, such as the snake, wax, bitter, teasel, and hedgehog, sometimes used as food or medicine; and gourds mentioned in the Bible. The second part takes up the bottle gourd, which has been used for thousands of years. Even today this gourd is almost indispensable in many parts of the tropics, where species are used to make containers, musical instruments, and clothing, as food and medicine, and in art. The book concludes with a discussion of the gourd in folklore and myth and an appendix on growing, hybridizing, and preserving gourds for decoration. Delightfully written for general readers, this book will also appeal to botanists, anthropologists, horticulturists, and everyone interested in plants or gardening.

Provides examples from twenty artists along with information on their tools, methods, and influences.

Jim Widess and Ginger Summit, the best-selling authors of The Complete Book of Gourd Craft and Making Gourd Instruments, have done it again: they’ve produced another winner to delight the many crafters who work with gourds. Large, lavish, and astonishingly comprehensive, this breathtaking volume introduces every tool and every technique associated with gourd carving, offers fabulous projects that advance in difficulty, and presents a gallery of works designed to inspire. See how to choose and prepare a gourd, impress the surface with a design, and work with green gourds. The magnificent methods of decorative carving covered include fretwork, engraving, chip carving, carving with gouges, relief carving, inlay, and deep relief or sculptural carving. Throughout, color photographs of exquisite carved gourds present crafts styles from countries around the world. A Selection of the Crafters Choice Book Club.

Provides step-by-step instructions for making, decorating, and playing more than sixty string, wind, and percussion instruments made from gourds, along with numerous color photos and cultural information on the instruments' places of origin.

A guide to gourd pyrography--using heat to create works of gourd art--that discusses gourd prep and work basics, provides step-by-step instructions for several designs and techniques, and presents secrets from fifty artists.