 in different countries throughout the world that this took place. For us, the Native Americans used gourds for almost everything. Even their children learned how to swim by taking two gourds tying together with a piece of raw hide and they could float in the water. Like our children's use the blow up now, the Native Americans use the gourds. In the old west times, the canteen gourd was extremely popular for holding water because the canteen gourd on the front of here you can see it and it is shaped and that's how it got its name by the cowboys or the people out west cut a hole in the top of that gourd, find some small rocks put inside and shake that gourd and then empty it and empty it and keep going until it could get the inside of the gourd as clean as possible because a gourd is extremely bitter. It has no nutritional value whatsoever. If you take your finger and wet it or a sponge or whatever on the inside or outside, the inside and then take your finger and put it in your mouth it'll take you a while to get rid of the bitterness and I got to meet a gentleman from Africa several years ago and he came over to see the artwork. He was a curator from Africa and he came over to see our artwork because they had gourds in Africa and I asked him, so what do you use them for? Well they had the big kettle gourds. They made their beer in the kettle gourds and he said we would not like it because the beer was extremely bitter and it would be because the beer was made in the inside of a gourd which would give it a very bitter taste. Musical instruments run from flutes to like banjos. There's all types of instruments that we've seen where artists have taken a big kettle gourd and made the bottom of it like the shape cut the top out flat and insert a piece of wood put an arm on it stretch the strings cut their hole and so forth. Some of the pieces are extremely expensive because there's the amount of time that's put in making musical instruments in gourds. If you have any questions at any time please feel free to stop me and ask because it won't interfere with my chain of thought. I'll miss half of what's on there. Yes sir, no, but they will cross pollinate with each other. That has happened. They have a gourd that about three years ago and I bought several of them and they're kind of a long round at the top round at the bottom and they're called potato gourd. A couple years before that I found some gourds that are shaped like a strawberry. They call them a strawberry gourd. So that's this the common name that they use. So those had cross pollinated with something and some ornamental gourds you have to hand pollinate and in order to hand pollinate you have to find the male and the female and so underneath the blossom there would be a knot. That would be where the gourd would be produced. You take another blossom and rub it together and then tape that shut for overnight or 24 hours depending on who you talk to and then take the tape off and that pollinates because they will not get pollinated by insects or wind and so forth. Growing gourds I know very little about. All I do know is they take up a lot of space. One plant can just about fill this room if you've got a good season and if you think I'm exaggerating well you need to look around the different places. Your big vendors that grow gourds to sell to artists because that's what has evolved with the gourd. The gourd has become very very popular throughout the United States and the world for creating artwork on. So they have huge trellises some of them are 13 feet tall and they plant at the base of the trellis all the way around and that will cover it and gourds will hang down the middle of the trellis and that keeps them up off of the ground which keeps them extremely clean. This is a fairly clean gourd here. This is a gourd that I'm working on not complete one that I've just got some wood burning done on it but those gourds that hang from a trellis or the ones that are kept off of the ground are the cleanest and so that those are more valuable to artists because if you are in competition at the shows that are throughout the United States if the cleaner the gourd the better the score is in the judging if you're into the competition so sometimes your green clean gourds are the ones that you want and other cases such as this little canteen gourd right here I chose it because it has I call a modeled area that kind of looks like wood. In fact I had a gourd that I sold that is now in Japan and it was a container with a lid and when I finished with it when you stood back and looked at it number one you could not see where the lid came off and number two it looked like wood it had so much texture in it from the mother nature so it looked like wood and so I was very proud of it and it was very hard for me to get rid of it because I don't really enjoy selling. Let me see if I've missed anything very important here of course the rattles that was probably the first instrument that the gourd was used you could take and shake it some gourds the seeds end up in a ball inside so they make no noise and so you're getting ready to work on the gourd depending on what you're going to do and how you're going to work on it the first thing you want to do is to shake it and if the seeds are loose it's probably going to be fairly easy to clean out if it doesn't rattle those seeds have ended up into a hard ball on the inside so when you cut it open such as this gourd right here has been cut open then this with the opening here and I'll get to this one here later but they're very you have to take like dental tools and so forth to clean until it takes hours to clean because once you open a gourd you need to clean all the white membrane out especially if you're going to enter it in competition and that because if the judges find any white membrane you probably will get disqualified even if your gourd artwork is the best on the table because you didn't follow the rules and the gourd rules have gotten stricter and stricter over the years I myself got involved yes ma'am oh yes a birdhouse gourd birdhouses will last for years if you have treated them properly yes yes well the most popular is a purple martin and they're normally sprayed white you know that helps they say that helps attract and so forth and I've I've seen the last for years I've got a little ren house that's about two years old because my wooden red house gave out on me and that's the only birdhouse that I've ever made out of a gourd so a lot of people you know when you talk about gourd is either a dipper to drink or you're making birdhouses I've never made but one birdhouse and that was for myself or for the rins I should say I beg your pardon I couldn't tell you I just picked out a gourd and and put a lip on the top of it I think it was a cannonball if I remember right but that uh I'm not sure I'd have to look at it when I got home it's been years ago but yes okay I know where that is purple martins yeah yes yes uh my first experience with the gourd was on the farm because my grandfather would get a dipper gourd every year cut the top out of the ball and clean the inside and yes the water would be it would be bitter but you were drinking water from a well or a cistern that had a lot of iron depending on where you live so it didn't make much difference you didn't know any difference if you had a glass of city water and you took a dipper gourd in you probably would uh near to my knowledge my grandfather did not treat the inside of it but you can treat the inside of a gourd and make it food safe and one of the best things to put on the inside of a gourd to make it food safe is beeswax you can buy beeswax you take a rag and you rub and rub the inside of it it seals it let it set for a month and do it again and you can put just about anything in there that you want to now you don't want water to sit in there for you know days and days and days some people will take gourds and use them as planters for flowers they're probably going to get one season out of it because the inside of a gourd is extremely soft and it absorbs water the exterior of the gourd repels water i don't know how long it would take for a gourd to float before it would get water inside and sink because a gourd that weighs 100 pounds in the field and i've i saw one in ohio several years ago that weighed 138 pounds it was green and when that gourd dries it would weigh a little over 10 pounds 13 pounds something like that so i always use 100 pound gourds will end up weighing about 10 pounds maybe 12 depending on the thickness of the gourd how thick is it oh i don't know because i bought it dried so i don't have i don't have any idea i got there are five gourds i think in there totally so they're all it this gourd is is right now is pretty heavy because there are several gourds and all the gourds are fairly thick so i i couldn't i couldn't even guess i'd have you'd have to weigh it when it was green in order to know how much it weighed in the field the one i'm talking about the weight of 138 pounds it took a forklift to get it from it to the truck to get it to the to the show you have any more questions the gourds there's three basic groups there's the ornamental that's the small gourds the ones that some of those have to be hand pollinated and then you have the hard shelled gourd and that's as you see here on the table every one of these gourds are hard shelled gourd and then the luffa are luffas didn't anybody know what that is like a sponge uh the native americans used it to scrub their bodies and probably scratch the heck out of them because it's not uh it's not very soft it might be when it gets wet and it's called a sponge gourd because it gives us name from that let me take a second here so the the people that are in the business of growing gourds to sell if they have clean gourds they can get more money for clean than you can dirty there's two ways to clean a gourd that i know of if anybody knows a better way i want to hear it i buy almost all my gourds clean now because of the amount of time it takes if a gourd has gone through the season which is like any other you know starting to spring and goes into the fall into the winter and turns brown then i soak those gourds for about 24 hours in water bleach and soap and then i take a tire brush or a plastic like an emery cloth not emery cloth what i want to say pat help me um to to scrub them anything to scrub the membrane on the outside because every gourd has a membrane on the outside that you have to get off before you can do your artwork on it or any kind of artwork on it and if you see a white spot on the gourd that is a membrane that you left on so all you have to do is dampen that area take an exacto knife always keep the gourd wet when you're cleaning it if it's dried gourd never try to clean it with it dried because it'll scratch whatever you use like a scouring pad type it will scratch it but if it's wet it will not scratch it there are sanders out that you can sand gourds and uh craftsman used to make one and i think another company has taken it over and uh it it does real well and for sanding the gourd and what it does it smooths the gourd and gives the gourd a sheen but uh you never want to do anything uh you know with anything coarse on a dried gourd because it will scratch and yes right yes but it would still be best in my opinion to take the outside membrane off but you didn't you wouldn't have to some people joke they don't even paint them white they just cut the size a hole and you always have a drain hole in the bottom some people don't know that that helps keep it from rotting so if it does get wet inside the water has a place for to drain out so you always have a drain hole in your purple martin houses your other way is to green clean a green cleaning gourd you're taking a gamble on the gourd shriveling on you like pumpkins and squash and so forth but i had a tremendous experience last year i have a a dust catcher because i do a lot of carving as you can see this here and i can take this and pass it around here in a little bit so you can look at it i have a dust catcher and i wear a mask and i wear headphones because my dust catcher is inside my house i take my dust catcher fortunately i have an empty lot next door to me and if they never build a house on it i'll be in good shape so i emptied my dust catcher out and uh last fall pat my wife this is my bride right over here uh 53 years in fact very proud of that she came in and she says we've got something growing in the lot next door there's a bunch of white spots out here and um pat doesn't drink so i knew she was you know wasn't seeing things so i went out low and behold on the side of this rocky hill and where i live in the lake of the ozarks it's almost all rock and the vine was huge and so i thought what i want to do is i want to green clean these so i left them alone and i took a gallon bucket out pat was in town i took a gallon bucket out when the the stem started turning brown some of them were already broken off some of them i just touched they fell off some of them i had to snap off i filled that gallon bucket and had to go get another bucket and i had 82 of the most beautiful egg gourds you ever saw in your life free of charge mother nature and so i took my pocket knife that i use all the time with the gourds and i scraped all the membrane off and i never lost one i found one that was already shriveled which is it's a very fortunate the advantage to that those gourds are all a real light tan i mean almost white and that's how we spotted them so there there is an advantage to green cleaning but you can't you do you take a chance on getting um getting in trouble with them shrinking and i wish i could remember and i need for my wife to get on the computer for me because i don't touch the computer i don't have a cell phone that tells you how old and and bullheaded i am uh i forgot where i'm going or where i was uh forgot what i wanted to talk about uh now i'm showing my age good get me started the the best way is to go through the full season off of the ground if that'll make it the cleanest yes yeah and they're yes go ahead some people have done that yes and uh you may get a little spot uh no i don't have it with me it's on the table over there i have one over there that a bottle big bottle gourd known is it this one no anyway but no it's um i've heard of people doing that i don't know how well it works there's all kinds of tricks like you take a dipper gourd and then i've seen dipper gourds that are in competition that are taller than i am and some of those growers will take a nylon hose and put rocks or bricks in it and as it grows it stretches that neck and makes it taller some people take a rope and they put a rope around and that makes that dipper gourd grow in a spiral so there and some people take and they tie knots in dipper gourds and that's a long drawn-out process from my understanding you get about one out of ten with a knot tied in it i've seen as many as two knots tied and the the uh the most fantastic gourds that i've ever seen was either china or japan and the american gordon magazine had an article and the gourd work there was phenomenal i mean it it it was beautiful and now i would like to get in a little bit here i've still got some good time left i got involved in this in about 1999 uh my wife and a real good friend came home and they had two gourds they had been to a craft festival in arkansas and patsy our friend she collects santa clauses so they wanted santa clauses painted on these two gourds well the last gourd i'd ever seen in my life was a dipper gourd on the farm when i was about 10 or 12 years old so i ended up painting on these two gourds which i do not like to paint i do not have any formal education in painting i did work as a graphic artist for one of the largest screen printing companies in the world up in the can city metropolitan area and that was a Cinderella story no matter what our government tries to tell you uh when i started there in 1960 with 20 employees when i left there were 537 years later and uh we never took a government contract so i just wanted to throw that out there so i hope i haven't lost some of you people but anyway it this i thought was really interesting because artists normally are painting on a flat surface and when you pick up a gourd the challenging part especially if you're drawing an animal or a person or a bird or something that gourd is very unforgiving like a cannonball gourd may look like it's perfect but when you start laying that out to do work on it you will find out there's one little bulge over here that's not over here so when you're measuring that because i will divide certain of my drawings such as this one right here i will divide them up in vertical and horizontal panels so they can end up square or rectangle or whatever the closer together that i make them the finer the cutting gets the farther apart the thicker the cutting gets so this was separated here about three-eighths of an inch apart in order to get that gap so it's uh i'm losing my thought again i need some more help but anyway i knew that i was going to get involved in something so the next year i went to the craft festival with patsy and and all four of us went her husband dean and i bought 12 gourds and i bought a i call it a boy scout wood burning set that was a mistake because i did not know anything about artwork on gourds and i went through those 12 gourds in no time at all with doing all kinds of drawings i don't even remember what they look like i have a photo magazine or a album with pictures and so forth that i'd be ashamed to show you from then to today so i got ahold of a friend of mine because i ran out of gourds and he had a computer and he lived at the lake of the ozarks to make a long story story short i went down and i bought 82 gourds from this orchard west of springfield missouri and so i had pats little honda full of these gourds because they were from this size to this size and so forth and i had 82 of them and now if i don't have 300 or more gourds to work on i i'm panicky and i'm kind of panicky right now because i've got a project in my head and i don't have the gourds i need to work on so i'm going to have to take a trip evidently but you get bit i think artists get bit by gourd art because of the shape that they're working with just dividing this up equally all the way around takes longer than it does to cut it out it takes hours to lay it out and it could take just a few minutes or just an hour to cut every one of these out at the top not the whole thing but just the top so it's my wife always says how do you have the patience to sit there and do that and gourd art is about the only thing that i have a lot of patience with now she's not in her head yes i can tell without even looking over there so and i don't know why and i've worked on trying to have more patience with other things but i do not do the artwork on the gourds to sell because i do not like to sell i'd rather give gourds away than i would sell yes sir any kind of gourd any kind of gourd in the art community and one of the best place to sell them would be at the show me gourd society gourd show the last full weekend of april and show me gourd society it's it's on the front of the if you got it one of those papers and if you'll stop by my booth i will be here for short for a short period of time after this i have some cards i can give you giving the details and so forth and because we just moved down to the springfield area uh last year so uh 2013 will be our second year and and it's a great place to sell yes i'm not a grower if i would i'd hate i would hate to answer that uh i've heard two different stories about gourd seeds i've heard that if a gourd freezes the seeds no good i've heard that's not true so i don't know you would have to talk to gourd grower uh go ahead clean that's real simple and yes ma'am what i've paid as much as $50 for one gourd clean and has a big gourd go ahead it would have probably been at least half that or maybe less and then when you got it home and you cleaned it it might not be worth two cents so when i first got involved in it i had no idea of what i was buying why i wanted to buy it i just like the shape and this that and the other and so forth but you learn over time of you pick up a gourd and in fact gourd has some heft to it it's heavy or feels heavy there's two things either it's not cured not it's wet inside and you can't see it which is probably not the case if it's gone through the full season like the gourd this summer around this area may not have been a great year because of the of the drought on gourd so i'm anxious to see what we get next year because we'll be buying this year's gourd next year at the Missouri Gourd Show and maybe some that are three or four years old that hadn't been sold they just keep bringing back so depending on what you want to make with the gourd if you don't want to open it up you really don't care how thick it is it doesn't make much difference to you those egg gourds that i have that i have cut a couple of them apart and i've gotten away without breaking them so far but i may not get that lucky you know and if i break it i keep all my pieces i got five gallon buckets everything that's cut out here is in my five gallon bucket somewhere or i made that flower if you can see that flower inside there that flower is all gourd and gourd seeds gourd seeds for the center of it and gourd pieces and that gourd was an accident and some of them are accidents i was cutting that gourd so i could cut that all the way around just like you see those little cutouts it slipped out of my hands and two of those pieces and there broke and sometimes they can break and you can glue them back together and you can't find the break i knew that was not going to work on this and then pat she came down and said well that would really be neat if you made something and put inside there so what i did is cut out the same amount of number on each side and then i would burn the back of it and then i started picking pieces up and i made the petals and the leaves and so forth and and made the flower so that gourd would have to go in a sculptured category a sculptured is where you take pieces to make something like i've made a giraffe for my wife she likes she has a collection of giraffes i think we've got a hundred or more in the house and so i you know you made different animals i've made oriental doll for her so there's a lot of sculpturing we have a very very fortunate in the state of missouri we probably have six artists or more that are nationally known artists and i am fortunate enough to be one of them and on my little business card there in front i want to brag a little bit and that's very that's very hard for me to do but that gourd there on that business card i entered in what they called a juried show that's where you fill out an application and it was in curvil texas it's a national show they take about 25 artists out of everybody that applies and you don't get your money back if you don't get chosen and then you have to deliver your gourds and they have about four different categories that you can enter in or you can enter in one category and that year i entered i think four gourds that gourd on my business card got a blue ribbon and got best of show that gourd came apart the outside gourd came apart in three pieces i still have the gourd at home i did not bring it today i chose this gourd over it and so i was very proud of that gourd and i still have it i have somebody in mind to give that to and you know i've got prices if you look i've got prices on my gourds my gourds run from twenty dollars up to several hundred dollars or into the thousands depends on you know what it is my wife has one gourd that i carved three bonsai trees out of on it's a bowl type and it's her gourd so she put the price on it and i told her one of these days somebody's going to pay it and you're not going to have it and i do not like to duplicate artwork i will if i have to but it has to be a very special occasion but the i want to get into the show just a little bit if i may and promote uh we got time and i don't want to run over but please feel free to interrupt me and ask me any questions we have i think around seventy seven different categories in our show in the show me gourd society maybe it's more than that now we have a growing category so you have dried gourds category where you would have the smallest the largest the longest the most unusual that grew in around the fence or three grew together uh so forth so you have categories for growers and then we start with the children because we're trying to get young people interested in gourd art and i'm in hopes and i have a good opportunity in springfield to spend one full day in an art class whatever art class this teacher has and i'm just waiting for that phone call because i'm dying to do that because it's uh it it it'll be a lot of fun because i haven't been to school for years so that would be a lot of fun but then and that runs up to i think seventeen years old and then you get into the novice category the novice categories of category where you're just beginning you have never ever entered a show you've never won a ribbon first second or third place and then we have the open category and that's where you have one one or more two or three whatever it is i don't remember all the rules of blue ribbons so now you're in the open category and after you start doing that for a while and you won best of show and you did this then we have a master's category and it just gets tougher and tougher and tougher believe me and the master's category i think has about four categories so in the missouri show i could only enter four gourds and there's normally a category that i stay clear out of i do not do any weaving or anything like that and i've never tried it but if i did try weaving i would not have to enter the masters because i've never done that before so it that's that's kind of the way that the show has run and then uh there's all kinds of difference awards in the towns we usually have the mayor come out and have the mayor pick out his favorite gourd that's in the competition and that just kind of a publicity stunt that we try to get you know more people involved but to see that to see the children get involved in it i think is one of the most exciting part for me anyway any more questions that you have yes yeah i wouldn't pick it green and let it dry without scraping the membrane off and i would not pick it green until the stem turns brown now that's what i've been told by growers but because i'm not a grower and i don't have a really a lot of background in that other than the questions that i've asked so to answer your question you either i think you're better off if you're going to sell them to grow them to sell i think you're better off letting them go through you might want to pick out so many if you have a good crop of a certain kind and because it takes it takes quite a bit of time to scrape that green membrane off and then you have to lay them out so they're not touching each other to let them come to dry i laid these out in my basement on a rug in my workshop and like i said none of them shrunk so i've i got real lucky in that area there but i know they can shrink one thing that did enter my mind and i'm not trying to be a politician or anything and i wish i could remember where i found this because i want my wife to try to find it i won't because i want to print it out and and share it with everybody years ago and i think it was in the 1800s there was a controversy and some some states still have a controversy on whether it's a fruit or a vegetable and i cannot remember so i can't answer that question but i can tell you this when in the 18 whatever it was the dates were they were trying to determine whether it was fruit or vegetable and our government got involved and our government had a tax tariff on one guess what the government called it and i don't remember whether it was vegetable or fruit but i thought i'd just share that with you i thought it was kind of interesting at the time and i just i let it go and i didn't i didn't keep that thought i'm going to glance through here real quick if you'll bear with me and see if there's something that i left out yet there are countries that gourds have played a part in their religion and their beliefs in different countries i thought that was rather interesting in Haiti in 1807 the gourd became valued for more than a functional use at this time the country was bankrupt and its people were entirely dependent on gourds as utensils and the food sources in order to get people to grow coffee beans instead the government collected all of the gourds on the island as property of the state they collected well over 200 000 when the coffee beans harvest was ready he exchanged gourds for coffee which then sold to the europeans for gold so it kind of tells you that gourd has really played a huge part in our world as we know it today and and still does so it's uh i'm just about to run out of gas and just about to run out of ideas unless you have any more questions i thought i could talk for an hour and a half but maybe i can't yes there that's a good point i think there's about 28 states now that have gourd societies hawaii does i think michigan was the last state that got their chapter recognized i've not been to michigan uh to them i've pat and i have traveled from uh yes a company that was making toys and all kinds of sellable products out of the gourds instead of decorating them and is that part of yours categories and do you know anything about that part of the gourd industry or the gourd world okay now back get that to me again here there was a company using gourds to make all kinds of toys and craft items i think they made helmets out of them and masks and different kinds of sellable items they had we have categories that uh like wall hangings or mask categories i have seen a lot of hats uh remember the old baseball hats that used to have the propeller on top of them i made one of those uh i know a man named rob gaio who rob was raised emus and he carved on emu eggs and in laid the emu carving in the the gourd and had beautiful artwork in it and he made a pith helmet out of a gourd that was just phenomenal i mean in pieces that was a sculptured gourd because it was in two pieces so no i i don't know about a company doing that but it's very interesting because i'd be interested to know where they're they're growing their own or if they're buying them or what they're doing because gourds are very strong i mean that they're stronger than than you realize and if you drop them on a concrete floor you know it's probably gonna crack and if it's a cannonball gourd and it's fairly thick it may bounce just like a ball and not not crack at all uh but at any time that you know anytime that i don't like a gourd i put it on the floor and i throw it in my five gallon bucket nobody sees it if i don't like it then i don't want anybody to see it people think that's kind of silly but to get back to myself and then i'm i always like to close with this because i shied away from artwork my entire life and something or somebody kept coming back and coming back and coming back and pounded me on the head that you should get involved in art and i kept ignoring it i was an athlete i wanted to go to school and play football and run track and i did and i had art as a minor i have very little formal art degree or education i have no degree from college i met this beautiful lady over here my junior year and about four months later it was all over and got married we went to work and then i went to work for gill studios the company but i looked and i said a while ago i i would rather give a gourd away than to sell a gourd because i finally come to my senses and by sheer luck i got that job at gill studios where an old sign painter taught me the trade of how to lay out and do this that and the other and i had a god's gift in this hand left-handed and that's how i made my living and i was on the drawing board for about seven or eight years so whenever i give a gourd away it's my way of thanking the good lord for the talent that he gave me and to make my living at that because i can remember the day that i went into this company thinking they're going to pay me to draw i couldn't believe it and they're going to give me a dollar and a half an hour and that was in 1960 i thank all of you and god bless