The Decorated Gourd.  by Dyan Mai Peterson

I ABSOLUTELY LOVE GOURDS. LOVE THEM, love them, love them!  I’m a self –taught artist.  I started with simple tools and the most basic techniques.  As I progressed, I developed my own techniques and personal style, and my hope is that you will, too.  I believe that when I am filled up with creativity, I need to give it away so I‘ll be filled up again.  That’s why I love teaching and why I wanted to make this book.  Sharing my excitement about gourds and my experience with them is one more way to replenish the well of my own creative spirit.  Please take my gift with you and run with it.

Many of my students have done just that.  And in turn, they’ve given me the gift of learning how to explain in words what I usually do intuitively in my art.  In “the Decorated Gourd,” you’ll learn many of the same techniques and processes we practice in our workshops.  There are the basic gourd techniques, such as dying, pyrography, and carving as well as new techniques I’ve never published before.  Since I love rim treatments, I’ve included a variety of them, with simple weaving and basket making techniques.  There are lots of embellishments, too, sometimes just for the sheer fun of making them.  Woven throughout the book are many creative and practical tips I’ve learned along the way.

I love gourds so much that several years ago I decided to create the name of a profession just for gourd lovers.  I called it gourdology.  You won’t find it in the dictionary, alas, so you will have to follow my definition:  Gourdology is the study of the structure, function, growth, history, evolution, and distribution of the gourd.  In other words, the study of the cucurbitaceous family of plants, which many gourdologists love to transform into gourd art.

Although I’ve been crafting gourds for more than seven years, the possibilities gourds present to the artist are so endless that I will always be a beginner.  Some days, especially when you are starting out, you might question why you set out on this path in the first place.  You spend half the morning picking out the perfect gourd for your project, and then your dye runs, you carve a hole right through the gourd, burn yourself on the burning pen, send a bottle of purple leather dye across the room, and accidentally knock your finished project off the table, watching helplessly as it falls to the floor and cracks into pieces. Welcome to gourd art!

You just had a bad gourd day.  We all have them.  The truth is we’ve gained valuable knowledge from every mistake we’ve made, since trial and error is our best teacher.  After we pick up another gourd the next day, dreaming how beautiful it will be when we apply what we learned the day before, we realize that all our days are good gourd days.

Warm regourds,

Dyan Mai Peterson