Stevie Grant lovingly hand-creates her gourd art with her husband, Mark Borgmier, from exotic hard-shelled gourds of varying shapes that become the canvas for rattles, bowls, baskets, centerpieces, vases, and more.
Gourds are a fruit in the same family as pumpkins and squash. Unlike their cousins, they taste bitter and are rarely eaten. The name gourd implies a hard rind and inedible fruit, but they are a gift from the Earth. Since ancient times, thousands and thousands of years before pottery was made, gourds have been used as bowls to eat and drink from, containers for storage, musical instruments, and palettes on which to carve and paint things of the imagination.