This is the very first gourd I worked with... it had some "issues", so I decided it would be a good guinea pig. It's a bit rough, but thought you might like to see it nonetheless!
I hadn't really planned to make it into a birdhouse, but when I was scrubbing/cleaning the first few gourds I had ready this year, I poked a big hole in the side of this one with my thumb. It's walls aren't very thick and, after soaking for a few hours in water, it became rather delicate while it was wet and when I was cleaning it.
Lesson learned!
Anyway, I adapted and decided to make it into a decorative birdhouse. I don't know if it would work for a real birdhouse or not ... the hole it pretty big (had to be due to the big tear I already had made in it with my thumb!) and much bigger than what is usually needed for most birds. So, this gourd ended up being a real test ground for me. Here's what I did to it ....
- First, I drew some free hand designs on it with pencil
- Then I wood burned the designs.
- Next, I decided to dye it all over with a purple ink dye.
- At that point it looked pretty good, but I thought it needed something else, so I decided to try painting on it with black acrylic paint.
- Then I decided that I didn't really like the black acrylic paint, so I put white acrylic dots over the black lines. I liked that better, but decided it would have been better/easier/more uniform to use paint markers for this rather than a paint brush (which I had used).
- Finally, I sprayed it with a high gloss polyurethane spray. However, I didn't realize that the ink dyes I was using needed to be set using a fixative spray first, and some of the inks ran a bit when I added polyurethane to them. Another lesson learned!
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