I met Barbara Whitbeck about 4 years ago at the Nampa Farmers Market when we were playing music there. We had taken a break, and I was walking around checking out all the goodies that the market vendors had to offer when I saw her beautiful gourds with all of these gorgeous designs and rich colors. They were unlike anything I had ever seen before. The quality of the work was immaculate, intricate, and very original.

Each gourd has its own unique characteristic that makes it a one of a kind piece. The images, whether they are of wolves, tribal designs, Celtic knotwork, birds, or dragonflies, are beautifully burned into the gourds by hand. Over the years I have bought a few pieces from Barbara and even had her design one with the dragon from the Welsh flag for me. It represents my family, and where we came from and it’s one of my most cherished pieces and is a family heirloom.

Although I have known Barb for quite a while, I really didn’t know much about her, beyond the fact that I loved her artwork and I adored her. When we sat down and chatted yesterday, I realized how much she and I really have in common. Kindred spirits really do flock together I believe. We are really just a couple of old hippies at heart. When someone says “You’re weird.” we reply “Thank you!”

Barbara has spent her entire life in the arts. Somebody handed her a gourd in the mid-2000s and she thought “Oh, what can I do with this? I love this canvas because it’s not blank.” Some designs don’t work well on a gourd because of the rounded shape and all the different parts to it, so a huge part of the creative process with gourds is knowing which designs will work or not. As with many of her artistic endeavors she doesn’t do things in small quantities. “My nature is not moderate…If I get an idea to make something, then I have to make a bunch of them, and all these different variations on them…Then I started making them, and I thought, ‘I really love doing this, but I can’t have all these gourds around.'”

Her first memories of doing handcrafts was in the fourth grade. She had started making doll clothes and sewed them by hand. That was the first product she remembers making. She said “They were terrible, but they had construction to them. They weren’t just wrap and ties.”

She had always drawn, and by the 6th grade she made pencil portraits of all her classmates. She would use rulers because she didn’t know what a grid process was. So she used this ruler to enlarge from a small picture to a large portrait. In the 8th grade, she made all of her Christmas presents that year. She had made stockings to hang. Like many artists, she has always been doing art or crafting on some level or other.

When she was in her 20’s she did farmer’s markets. She would go to a thrift shop and buy old clothes that she would redesign into the fashion of the day. She thought “That’s a dream I would love to do, so I started back at the farmer’s market here bringing my gourds. It was really exciting the first day. Someone actually bought something…It cost me $15 to (set up a booth at) the market, I made $16.” It didn’t matter because she was happy.

It wasn’t about the amount she made, it was about the fact that someone would spend money to buy her gourd. One of her favorite things about being at the market is all the people she meets. She loves just hanging out and talking to people, even if she doesn’t make any sales.

We talked about her process with the gourds and I asked her if she had to hollow them out and she said that isn’t an issue because they are like a pumpkin, they are full of seeds in the middle. They are really hollow. She has a farmer that occasionally brings her green ones that she sticks out on her back patio and she lets the sun take care of them. In the spring they are dry, and at this point, she soaks them, scrubs the outside off, and then if she is going to open them up, she decides where she is going to cut them at. At this point, it’s the scraping process.

There are two kinds of gourds. They are much like pumpkins on the inside. There are the fluffy kind, and then there’s the really icky, slimy kind. Gourds are the same way, but they are all dried out. When the fluffy stuff dries, you have to really scrape it out, and it’s a pain. The other stuff gets crispy and you just kind of pick it out. She prefers the slimy part. No one ever said that creating art was going to be easy.

After the gourds are prepped and ready to go, she has what she calls blanks, which are the gourds, prior to any design element being placed on them. She has blanks that will become bells, night lights, and birdhouses. There is a bag here and a bag there. They are everywhere. She then decides what design to put on a particular gourd. Taking graphite paper, she places the design on the gourd, and then burns the design into the surface.

Like many artists, Barbara has evolved and will continue to evolve. The end of the evolution for us comes when we are in the ground. “It’s too ingrained in who you are. There’s no end of the line because the end of the line is when you are gone. The urge to create is what I call a maker. I’m a maker by nature. I’m going to make something, period. It doesn’t matter what it is, I’m going to make something.”

She also makes little felt finger puppets that she sells on Etsy. She has a doorway puppet theater that she puts on a tension curtain rod. You stand behind it and do a puppet show with it. That sells really well on Etsy.

She has been meaning to start weaving on a loom that is in her spare room. She has had it 10 years and has never weaved on that loom yet. Barbara has a friend, Anne Pitcher, who makes goat milk soap and vends at the Nampa Farmers Market. Anne raises her goats, milks them, and then uses the milk to make yogurt and lye which is used to make the soap. Anne wanted to get into fur goats that you shave and use the fur like wool, carding it and then spinning it for weaving.

Barbara and Anne were going to use the loom that Barbara has along with Anne’s wool to weave, but neither one of them has ever gotten there yet. They were going to take the loom to Anne’s house where it would be easier to work with, but they have to take the doors off of the room where the loom sits in order to get it out. They decided that the loom would stay where it is. Who knows? That may very well be Barbara’s next artistic evolution.

Recently she has been working with children in the arts. She has been helping them to make designs out of Sculpey clay. The kids make food, flowers, animals, and whatever else their minds can conjure up. The designs are so cute!

“The cool thing about it is that these were all middle school kids, and they came from all over the valley…There was a group of refugees that spoke Swahili, so they were from Africa. We had a group of immigrants from Mexico, we had some Marshallese Islanders, we had caucasian kids. It was this big mix of children. It was absolutely fabulous. One of the groups chose to teach the other groups the clay work.”

Working with children is probably closer to what she will be doing in her future endeavors by teaching them art. Barbara is a Baha’i, which is a religion and one of the tenets of this religion is the transformation of the world one heart at a time. One of the best ways to teach this philosophy is to start with the young. Barbara was a middle school teacher that taught math and science which is inately tied to art.

One of the ways they have found efficacious is to work with children, imparticularly with the middle school aged child. The middle school class is called Spiritual Empowerment and through these teachings the children see at a young age that they can make a difference in the world.

They located a group of kids that were wanting to go to children’s classes, and they meet once a week. They have 16-25 children that come and 3 adults that supervise. The group that they work with in the Caldwell area is made up of immigrants, mostly Mexicans. One group is from 5th grade down with the youngest being 2 or 3 years old. They sing with them, they tell stories, they say prayers, they do art, and they play games. It is an amazing program!

When I think of a renaissance woman, I think of Barbara Whitbeck. She is an amazing artisan and craftsperson, and far beyond that, she has the sweetest, most pure heart of anyone I have had the honor to meet in my lifetime. There is only one other woman in my life that has touched my heart the way she does and that was my beautiful grandmother Marion Ward.

To find out more about Barbara, or how to acquire one of her beautiful gourd masterpieces, please got to her web site at Barbara’s Handcrafts https://www.facebook.com/Barbaras-handcrafts-103300746425445/. You can also find her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/barbara.whitbeck. She will be at the Nampa Farmers Market as well, so if you want to get a good look at her work that’s a great place to come and check it out.