Shekere Build - Part III

In the last post I left off having applied a bit of shellac. I wound up putting on about 10 or 12 coats, because that is all of the leftover shellac that was in a bottle I found. Today I gave it a bit of light sanding with a gray 3M scrubbing pad, and finished it off with a coat of pure tung oil (the good stuff, not the Home Depot version).

Lots of thin coats of shellac topped with a coat of oil.

It turns out my trombone stand is a perfect holder for this job.

If you are wondering how I did this, I made an applicator out of an old t-shirt. The trick is to keep as many wrinkles out as possible.

My shellac applicator made from an old t-shirt.

I charged the applicator with shellac, and wiped it onto the gourd in very thin coats, using as long of swipes as I could. The gourd itself made this much easier, as it is by no means a reference-flat surface that will reflect like a mirror. The uneven surface of the gourd was very forgiving.

Shellac applied this way does not take long to dry to the touch. The first three or four coats went on one after the other, with some scrubbing with a gray scrubbie after it is dry enough. The other coats needed between five and 20 minutes of drying time in-between.

The more coats, the better it looks. I finally stopped when my bottle of shellac was empty.

I had intended to add some paste wax on top of the shellac, but I don't seem to have any, so I used some pure tung oil that I found in my fine finish stash.

If I were to do this again, I would not have used a super-clear version of shellac. This would have been a perfect project on which to use a much darker garnet shellac. No matter, this gourd looks very natural, which can be good.

Now that the finish of the gourd is done, it is time to get on with the interesting part: the bead netting. I had prepared a few days ago a triple strand of my 1mm leatherworking thread that I will use for this project. I loosely wrapped it around the neck of the gourd and tied it with a square knot. The rest of the lattice will be attached to this collar.

I unwisely decided to use white thread for the netting. According to the YouTube video I watched, I need a couple dozen lengths of this string sized to double-full arm-spans (approximately 3 meters, maybe a bit longer).

Instead of cutting all the lengths of string and then attaching them, I cut them one at a time, and attached them as I went.

The first net-string attached to the collar.

This worked very well, and had the advantage of not collecting piles of cut string waiting to be installed.

Fold the string in half, then attach to the collar like this.

I got a little less than half done when I ran out of string.

This is as far as I got.

I don't know what I was thinking. I have tons more black string and some other colors, too. I thought about using the black and alternating it with the white. That might look cool. 

In the end I decided to order more white thread, so further progress will have to wait for another day.

Stay tuned... I have a psychic feeling I don't have enough beads.