Gourd Fairyhouses

May 30, 2014 
There are some interesting gourd fairyhouses happening right now by amazing artists: Vidya, Anne at A Little Fur in the Paint, and my current favorite by Dianne Lordan which is a labeled drawing of a gourd house. These, and MANY more, inspire me to try my hand at making a house. I have begun with a base which is a kettle gourd I initially painted white, but I think the decoupage with the rose giftwrap paper will be the way I continue in addition to attaching an attic and side rooms.

oH NO!!  Another work in progress!  The studio just moves on, a little bit here and a little bit there.

We keep crackin' here in the Crackled Apples Gourd Patch!

A collection of gourd rooms attached to a gourd
great room with a series of stairs and doors. 

CA Mohr



August 24, 2014
It's been exciting to begin this fairyhouse project. Initially, the gourd shape concerned me since I was working with a preconceived idea of what a gourd house would like. It took a while to step away from what I have seen, and go toward what would evolve with the materials at hand. With that in mind, this is what I'm thinking:

This gourd fairyhouse would be a community of rooms attached together. An inspiration for this comes from the
Montezuma Castle in Arizona -- a 20 room dwelling. The drawing shows 5 gourds attached to each other by a series
of doors and stairs.

Front/side

Back

I began with a great room which was a large kettle gourd with an open front, windows on the sides and decoupaged with the rose giftwrap to maintain the girlie-fairyhouse feel. I suspect the other rooms will be variations of this design: windows and a floral/fauna decoupaged exterior to be different and yet work together visually. I made it a point to eyeball the windows instead of measuring a precision-ed grid of squares. By drilling four small holes in each of the window corners, I could get my jigsaw blades into the window space to cut out the shape. FYI: this is especially helpful when the gourd wall is thick.

Now, to choose the gourds for the extra rooms and snake gourds for the stairs!

Hmmm...this may take some crackin' powerful thinking....
CAMohr