A Message From Our President

Greetings!

I want to start my first message by saying thank you to Olive Moore, our past President, for your dedication these past five years, and welcome to the Treasurer’s position! Thank you, Christina Chrivia, our past Treasurer, for 15 years of watching over our finances. Welcome, Janice Horner and Debra Zimmerman, our new VP, and Ambassador at Large, respectively. We encourage you to please visit the CGS website and get to know who your new and current officers and Coordinators are.

My name is Marilyn Phelps, the newly elected President of California Gourd Society. My husband Tony and I live in Pollock Pines, a small, forested area on the west slope of the Sierras about an hour west of South Lake Tahoe. We are both retired but have part-time jobs.

I’m surprised to find myself here, in this position, as I am still a newbie to this art form. I joined the Folsom Gourd Artists in 2015, with a membership to CGS and the American Gourd Society after attending a gourd festival at Davis Ranch. I was very impressed with the wonderful art made from hard shell gourds. I took a personal class with Joyce Campbell, which was a great experience. Since then, I was sold on gourds and have attended the Baskets & Gourds Conference in Visalia twice, taking classes and enjoying the camaraderie of like-minded gourd enthusiasts. A member of our local patch invited Bonnie Gibson to our area, and I was fortunate to be able to attend her classes as well. Since then, I’ve taken many more classes and entered a few competitions, winning a couple of ribbons. Another great experience was attending a CGS retreat where I met Society members from all over the state. Now, I’m ready to get to it with my new role, and some help from our board and membership.

I attended a Zoom AGS meeting in the first part of February. From what I gathered the entire country is looking forward to when we can start having festivals filled with eager gourd lovers again. If you don’t already belong to AGS, please consider a membership. Your membership includes a quarterly full-color professional magazine. It is filled with State Chapter news from all over the US, free tutorials, articles on featured artists, and references on where to buy supplies, and much more, including many beautiful photos. Our CGS board met on January 9th via Zoom. Here are some of the subjects discussed.

• We voted on upgrading some business tools that will aid in getting information out to the membership.

• There are at least 2 CGS competitions planned this year, either virtually, in person, or a combination of both.

• Unfortunately, the California State Fair was canceled for 2021, but some County Fairs are advertising for this season. Check your local county!

• Visalia’s Basket and Gourds has again been postponed to April 2022.

• We discussed the possibility of a traveling gourd.

• CGS now has a YouTube channel available for tutorials and demos.

• VP Janice Horner made some beautiful fitted black tablecloths for CGS.

• New hooded sweatshirts with the CGS logo will be available for sale soon.

• Raffle tickets are still selling for the Baskets and Gourds drawing for gourd quilts or mosaic tiles made by our patches.

• When shopping on Amazon, choose the California Gourd Society as your charity by purchasing items on Smile.Amazon.com.

On an administrative note: The formatting on some of our Welcome Letters that went out may have been off. You can re-print a revised version of the Welcome Letter from the member’s only page on our website. I would like to end by encouraging all patch leaders and members to help promote membership in the California Gourd Society for 2021. Here’s to a better and prosperous year! Thank you for your support.

Your President, Marilyn Phelps