More gourds!

I'm having fun experimenting with all my dried gourds.  These are dipper gourds, named because the native Americans used them for spoons and dippers.  You can see that they are large enough to be made into a ladle.  One of the gourds that I dried out cracked and I am going to see if I can make it into a ladle that just hangs on the wall.  

These really were fun to grow. They grow large and fast so they are fun for kids to watch and count because the plant really goes crazy, with alot of gourds coming from one plant. I had mine on a dripper system so it got plenty of water. You can see we got a ton of them once we finally picked them all!!  

You can't eat these so it is more of a fun thing to grow and watch and hopefully have some for drying, painting etc.  

So then we tried drying all of these.  Sadly out of all of these, only about 10 were dried successfully. I followed the same procedure as the smaller gourds for drying...(see last post)...wiping them off with a bleach/water mixture about once a month.  All these types of things take a little experience I think and this was the first time I tried it.  Some of them just got soft and I had to throw them out, but others dried inside and out.

I spray painted this one with some white paint....Ace brand spray paint is not very good by the way! Next time I will use a different one. Then I used some masking tape to spray on a gold stripe and added some glitter paint circles after using a milk cap and pencil to make the circles.