While looking for gourds locally, I found the Alabama Gourd Society (http://www.alabamagourdsociety.org/). On their site they have several gourd growers listed. That's where I got Debbie's name. Thinking she was a grower, I contacted her about the gourds we needed for this project. Turns out she's not a grower, but rather an artist! and she happened to have a surplus of EXACTLY what we needed. Good job Debbie!
What we ended up with were Canteen gourds. Turns out they were grown in Arizona and therefore benefited from the increased heat and a longer, dryer growing season. Big deal....right?
Well apparently it is a big deal. The result is some CRAZY thick gourds. Perfect for pounding tacks into when we get ready to skin them with the goat skin.The thickest one was just at .5" thick. Normally gourds of this size would only be about half of that or around 1/4" thick.
So to begin, we put all of the student's names in a hat, took one gourd at a time, and drew the name of the student that it now belongs to.
Next, we marked each one with each name and picked which side would be the top and bottom of the gourd. Then I cut a clean-out hole in each gourd with a roto-zip and we emptied the seeds and pulp. Some gourds were worse than others....
Some of the class started decorating the back and sides of thier gourds. We'll use dye, ink and woodburning to personalize the gourds before we make them into banjos.
4 comments:
My favorite part so far was cleaning the gourds out.
I love reading the progress of the making of your banjos! Where are you getting goat skin?!
Thank you, Doug...this is very wonderful.
Maybe you all could play them at the epiphany program? Just kidding...
Mrs. Walker
i liked when we washed them out
Luckily we'll be ordering the goat skins.... I don't care to be that authentic.
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