Carving on a gourd doesn't require very much in the way of tools or talent -- mostly just patience in laying out a design. All of the gourds shown for this lesson were carved using just two or three gouges (chisels with u-shaped cutting surfaces), and were laid out using only simple tools such as a compass for drawing circles and a pencil and straight edge for drawing straight lines.

The basic idea in carving is pretty obvious -- you just sketch some lines or designs on the gourd and then follow along them with the gouge, cutting through the hard outer skin and exposing the softer woody material underneath. The outer skin and inner woody material will absorb dye differently, allowing you to create color contrast and make the carving visible. You don't hammer on the gouge or anything -- you just grasp it by the handle, pointing forward, place the cutting surface flat on the gourd, tilt the gouge up until the tip just begins to "bite" into the gourd, and then push. Of course it takes some practice to develop the technique and keep the gouge from digging in too deeply or, alternatively, skidding across the hard surface and stabbing you in the palm. (It doesn't take many such experiences before you learn to keep your hand out of the way!) Some people evidently wear a glove to protect their hand, but I have trouble enough holding the slippery gourd in my lap without complicating things with a glove. Woodcarvers make a big fuss about keeping their tools incredibly sharp, and it really does make a difference once you've mastered the basics, but I'd say that tool sharpening is a refinement that the beginner doesn't need to be too concerned with at this point.
 

The gourds pictured above would be examples of "chip carving", and those ess-shaped worms that seem to be radiating out from the centers of the circles are something that just "happens" after you apply a stain if you've been careful in laying out and executing your cuts. This lesson will teach you how to achieve the same effect if you can get your hands on a reasonably sharp gouge, preferably about 1/4 inch wide and with a relatively deep "U" shaped tip.

We'll begin by drawing an "equator" around the widest part of a nice symmetrical gourd, and then measure the gourd's circumference around this equator using a dressmaker's cloth tape measure. Let's suppose that we measure 25". Now, let's take a compass, place the point on the equator somewhere, and draw a few trial circles on the gourd -- trying to establish some proportions. We're trying to determine the largest circle we can reasonably draw without the circle disappearing too much under the gourd or getting too high up on the neck. Once we've found something that looks pretty good, let's measure the diameter of this circle. Suppose it turned out to be 6". Well, how many 6" circles can we place around the 25" equator? The answer is a little more than four, so we have a decision to make: shall we use four 6 1/4" circles or five 5" circles? I'd vote for 5", so we'd draw five 5" circles around the equator, with each one barely touching the next.
 

If we wished to do an "endless circles" pattern like the example shown in the photograph of the larger bowl on the left, we'd use the same centers and draw additional circles maybe 1/2" larger radius and 1/2" smaller radius than the first circles. The area where the circles meet would look something like what I've shown in Figure 1, and you can see that by leaving some of the lines and erasing others you'd end up with interlocking circles. Later on, you may wish to get a smaller gouge and just gouge along these lines to outline the "chip carved" portions as I've done (it's very tedious work), but the thing we're most interested in for this lesson is what's inside those outlines.

So what we need to do now is to draw another circle about 1/4" smaller radius than the smallest one we've drawn thus far. Now let's call this a pie, and draw lines dividing the pie into 16 equal parts as shown in Figure 2. Then let's draw additional circles inside the pie, each one 1/4" radius smaller than the one before until we get close to the center. See Figure 3. (The reason for having the circles separated by 1/4" has to do with the assumed 1/4" width of our gouge -- if it was a 3/8" gouge, then we'd use 3/8" separation.) So finally we're ready to start carving? Well, maybe we'd better practice on a piece of scrap gourd first until we get the hang of making the cuts.
 

The cuts are actually made in two steps -- first you press the tip of the gouge perpendicularly into the gourd until you break through the outer skin, leaving a C-shaped indentation. You need to go pretty deep -- perhaps the thickness of a dime -- practice will teach you how deep. This is called a "stop cut". The next step is to back off some appropriate distance (say 1/2") from the closed side of the stop cut and begin to gouge out a chip heading toward the back side of the "C", getting deeper as you go. Twisting/rocking the tool back and forth helps control the cut, and finally when you reach the back side of the stop cut the chip will pop out, leaving a triangular cut with little grooves where you rocked the tool. See Figure 4.

So now we're really ready to start carving our gourd. We'll begin by making a few stop cuts around the outside circle of our "pie" as shown in Figure 5, and then we'll reverse the orientation of our gouge and make a few more stop cuts on the next inner circle, then reverse the tool again to make still more stop cuts on the next smaller circle, etc. Notice how the "C's" more or less interlock with each other? That's what's going to create the "esses" as we begin removing chips -- as shown in Figure 6. So now we'll go back to the outside circle of the pie and start gouging out those chips. Place the tip of the tool on the circle line about 2/3 of the way over to the next stop cut and remember to gouge toward the closed side of the stop cut! Don't worry too much if all your cuts don't look the same -- lots of irregularities and seeming "mistakes" will disappear when you later apply a coat of leather dye and paste shoe polish.
 

You can pay just about anything you want to for gouges -- most of my pieces have been done with a $10 gouge issued in a carving workshop at the Ohio Gourd Show, and with a smaller gouge which came in a $10.95 set of eight picked up at a hobby shop. Out of curiosity I recently ordered a Swiss made gouge for $35 and a set of six made in China for $4.95, and after a great deal of sharpening, the Chinese ones seemed to do an adequate job -- although I certainly expect the more expensive Swiss tool to stay sharp longer. I recently ordered a dozen or so 1/4" #9 Sweep gouges from Woodcraft for a workshop I was teaching -- I believe they cost about $10 each, plus shipping. Woodcraft has a website ( www.woodcraft.com ) with an on-line catalog if you're interested, and you can navigate down through CARVING and then CARVING TOOLS to WOODCRAFT CARVING SET where you'll find gouges of the type I ordered. (I'm not on their payroll -- I just got good service from them.)

Good luck with your carving, and keep the Band-Aids handy!