Dear AT, I have a huge bowl full of leftover gourds from Thanksgiving. They're in great shape and I don't want to throw them out. How can I make them Christmas-y? I was considering painting them silver and gold. But I thought this might be a good question for the site. Do you have any ideas? Maybe I'll try painting them and send you before/after pics.
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We've seen several hand decorated Christmas themed gourds, but think painting them in silver or gold sounds wonderful. Have any other readers out there used gourds in their winter holiday decorations?
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Comments (8)
or silver and while. Paint them all white and tuck some red berries in with them...
Silver leaf them.
Try a glassy or silver glitter- like a coating of frost. Pile them in a glass bowl or tall glass container. I love using gourds in their own variety of colors & shapes; some last a few weeks, some over a year. I don't do anything to preserve them because I never remember what you are supposed to use! I like the idea of Christmas colors! The tiny sizes are available here in Colorado- suits a small home better.
a pair of googley eyes on each.
nothing else.
because googley eyes are timeless.
You could wire them onto a wreath, or poke a skewer in to them and use them in a centerpiece with pine cones, or dry them out (some of them dry beautifully) and then paint them, or cut them and use them as candle holders (after they're dried) or paint them and put them in a bowl or put Elmer's glue all over them and dip them into glitter or tiny beads of different colors. If you dry them, you could even make ornaments out of them or a garland. The possibilities are endless!
I have a little stump on my table that has holes drilled into it and I stuck tiny branches cut from a neighbors tree in the holes, covered the holes with moss for color and also stuck some leftover cranberries from thanksgiving at the ends of a few branches for more christmas color. I have 3 yellow and green colored gourds just sitting at the bottom around it and it looks awesome. This was improvised for a centerpiece for hosting a dinner for friends this past weekend. Before that I had an old tabletop vintage white xmas tree on the table and they were nice paired with that too, it was just too tall to see across the table while dining so I replaced it with the other scene.
We had some left over pumpkins that sadly we never carved before halloween :( For a holiday party we had this saturday, we ended up carving a Christmas tree in one and a Menorah in the other. They looked pretty cool outside with a candle inside :)
Pile them (au naturel) in a bowl with gold and copper glass ornaments, and maybe some other warm metallic color items (leaves, ribbon, bells, whatever.)