Men Away, Women Will Play

John had to go to Montreal for a NCASI meeting this week...so, my friend Sandiana and I decided to get together to be 'crafty'. I worked hard through the weekend on my real job : ) and then San came over Monday nite through this afternoon. We were VERY productive and I have several posts today to prove it! Both of us had a list of projects we wanted to start/finish/attempt and I think we each got all but about one done.

One of the main things I did was to redo the gourd for my brother (and thank goodness, this one was MUCH better in general quality!). With San here to offer encouragement, I was a bit more ambitious with this one. Same concept but very different style and I love how it turned out. All that is left to do is spray a semi-gloss protective coating over it which I'll do tomorrow. The pictures make it hard to tell, but for those curious, the band around the middle that is 'natural' in color is actually a carved section that was done using a drimmel tool (basically a drill). So the fish and the coral are actually raised some off that surface...what's around them has been carved down. Otherwise, the fish are painted with acrylics, the inside is painted, and the top and bottom of the gourd was stained black.

I put in three different views of the gourd as well as a picture of me carving for anyone interested. Enjoy and let me know what you think!

The next couple posts below are the rest of what I did during our 'play' period....check them out.

Now back to the grind...the seemingly never ending task of data entry!