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Step 2Cleaning the outside.
Normally when I scrub gourds I have garden bags full and tackle them all at once. I fill my kitchen sinks with hot water and a bit of bleach and shove as many gourds in there as will fit. Gourds bob like little buoys so you have to either find a way to hold them under water, or you have to periodically turn them to make sure all sides get wet and soak thoroughly. I do not have photos of this process, but will ad some later, after my next gourd shopping expedition.
What I do have is a photo of a gourd that didn't need much soaking and did well with just some hot water and a copper scrubbie. You can see I wasn't wearing gloves, which was a poor idea, because my wet fingernails were shredded. Yuck. Wear gloves.
This gourd is mottled from fungus, and as a result wasn't very pretty once clean, as the thick fungus darkens parts of the shell while the sun bleaches out parts with thinner or no fungus. If your gourd is too mottled for your liking you can set it out in the sun for a few days, which will fade it slightly, or you can try wrapping it in a bleach soaked rag for a few hours (then rinsing and drying). Neither option is guaranteed to lighten the shell, but occasionally it works.
If you have a gourd with waxy areas on the shell you'll have to soak longer, scrub harder, and possibly resort to scraping the wax off with the edge of a knife. I won't lie, this can be a huge pain in the patootie. But if you want dyes or inks to evenly saturate your gourd shell you will have to remove the waxy skin.
You can scrape the outer layer of skin off green (as in not yet dried) gourds, which effectively removes the waxy substance before the gourd dries, saving one the labor of scraping off the hardened stuff later. However, this can result in a collapsed gourd due to uneven drying based on the skin's removal (even during the drying process, the skin does offer protection against the shell drying out too quickly). You decide whether the risk is worth it. My luck with this method has been 50/50 at best.
What I do have is a photo of a gourd that didn't need much soaking and did well with just some hot water and a copper scrubbie. You can see I wasn't wearing gloves, which was a poor idea, because my wet fingernails were shredded. Yuck. Wear gloves.
This gourd is mottled from fungus, and as a result wasn't very pretty once clean, as the thick fungus darkens parts of the shell while the sun bleaches out parts with thinner or no fungus. If your gourd is too mottled for your liking you can set it out in the sun for a few days, which will fade it slightly, or you can try wrapping it in a bleach soaked rag for a few hours (then rinsing and drying). Neither option is guaranteed to lighten the shell, but occasionally it works.
If you have a gourd with waxy areas on the shell you'll have to soak longer, scrub harder, and possibly resort to scraping the wax off with the edge of a knife. I won't lie, this can be a huge pain in the patootie. But if you want dyes or inks to evenly saturate your gourd shell you will have to remove the waxy skin.
You can scrape the outer layer of skin off green (as in not yet dried) gourds, which effectively removes the waxy substance before the gourd dries, saving one the labor of scraping off the hardened stuff later. However, this can result in a collapsed gourd due to uneven drying based on the skin's removal (even during the drying process, the skin does offer protection against the shell drying out too quickly). You decide whether the risk is worth it. My luck with this method has been 50/50 at best.
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