83^rd North Carolina Gourd Arts & Crafts Festival

September 6 – 7, 2025

2025 Instructor Biographies

Alphabetical by last name

---

Cara is a self-taught artist from Trinity, NC. She’s been creating art professionally since 2007. Her specialties are realistic acrylic paintings and gourd sculptures of animals. She focuses on details and refined techniques learned through her years of experimenting, combining gourds, wire, and various clays together to create complex creatures. Her work has been in gallery and museum exhibits across the US and sold worldwide online. You can see her work at her website www.carabevan.com

---

My goal teaching a class is always have fun! I love working with gourds.
Looking for ways to create a beautiful gourd more efficient and easy.
I also grow gourds on our small farm, Hector’s Creek. It gives me great
pleasure to see a seed I planted, bloom and grow into a piece of art.
NC Gourd Society and Triangle Gourd Patch have helped me so much
over the years. Judi Fleming taught the first class I took.

---

Brenda Elshof has been weaving and teaching baskets for the past 28 years, crafting and teaching in gourds for the last 10 and a wood turner turning bowls, platters, wine goblets plus so many more artistic objects. She has lived in the Raleigh area for the last 30+ years having moved from Colorado.

---

Altan Erginkoc creates free-hanging and wall-mounted, light-emitting wooden gourd works and ceramic sculpture. Originally from Turkey, Erginkoc has exhibited his artwork internationally, at numerous art fairs and festivals, at the American Craft Council’s American Craft Show in Baltimore, and at the National Folk Festival in Salisbury, Maryland. 

---

Judi Fleming has been creating gourd folk art and fine art for nearly 30 years and has won many best of show and gold medals at gourd festivals, fairs and juried art shows. She has taught gourd classes around most of the east coast and southern United States and does gourd talks and demonstrations from fairs, to garden clubs to historic sites as she enjoys spreading the gourd word about this versatile vegetable. Judi is the current President of the North Carolina Gourd Society.

---

Anna has a small business degree that is heavy on the accounting side. She has 20 years in Technical Writing, Illustrating, and training in an industrial environment, and moved into the self-employed side of business doing the bookkeeping for her husband. She started designing and creating jewelry as a side job and stepped into gourd art accidently, and was hooked forever. She has been working with gourds for around 16 years and loves it as much or more as the first time she created a bird house and a gourd light. She loves teaching gourd classes and watching her students sometimes take it way beyond where she stopped. It is satisfying to see her designs grow into different things based on the student. She believes heavily in detailed tutorials so students can go back in a year or two and still be able to create what they did in class.

---

Holly Gallagher started Gourding ten years ago when she moved to Georgia. A member of the Flint River Gourders Patch in Griffin, GA, she is also a director of the Georgia Gourd Society and Show Chair of the GGS GourdFest in October.

After many classes (carving – burning – weaving – rims) from some of the greatest teachers in the US, Holly has decided that her favorite technique is embellishment. Come and enjoy a relaxing time playing with sari silk yarn and glue.

---

Robyn has been doing art for over 30 years and has a background in fine art. She discovered gourds in 2010 when she went looking for a new media to work with.  She has won many ribbons for her work and is a part of the N.C. Society and American Gourd Society. Robyn teaches gourd art at various festivals and events in NC. She sells her gourd art and fine art at various shows and venues. The joy of meeting people and teaching different techniques is one of her favorite things to do.

---

Ellen Healy has been active in the Raleigh area gourd scene for several years.  She ran the NCGS festival for a few years and is quite active in the Triangle Gourd Patch.  Her favorite aspect of doing art with gourds is learning new techniques and creating scenes such as an underwater world or a fairy house.

---

Leslie Meier is an NC native, a retired law enforcement officer and former make-up artist. She has been growing gourds for over 11 years now and has been doing some form of art for over 25 years. Her style is reminiscent of Tim Burton and is currently working in multimedia, to include either gourds or pottery in many of her award-winning pieces.

---

Pam Milat has been designing and weaving baskets for over 19 years.  A native of MO, she retired in NC from her corporate career in 2016 and jumped into sharing and teaching basket weaving.  She is a member of several basket organizations including NCBA and her local Port City Basketmakers guild.  Pam travels to several out-of-state basket conventions/events each year to teach her art as well as teaching at the Leland (NC) Cultural Arts Center.  She has had the honor of having her basketry art selected for 3 Gallery Shows and she also sells her baskets at the Seaglass Monthly Market in Castle Hayne, NC.

Pam teaches multiple techniques of basketry, from plain utilitarian to artistic wonders, catheads to ribs, twills to double walls.  Though they are mainly in reed, she uses color and texture to create their beauty.  She dyes all her reed at her kitchen stove, blending and tweaking to create new rich vibrant colors.

---

Tammi is a NC native, born in Hendersonville. She has been involved with gourds for almost 3 years. She has enjoyed going to festivals, meeting wonderful people and learning all she can. She taught stamping techniques, cards, crafting for over 20 years and enjoys teaching others her love for crafting.

---

Like most people, during the 2020 pandemic, Regina started taking pyrography classes with Jeanette Egan, a member of Triangle Gourd Patch.  It was through local friends’ advice. Regina started using gourds as a medium for her art and the rest is history.  

Today, Regina has expanded and developed her wood burning skills to include clothing such as western style hats, baseball caps and handbags.  Regina has been a member of the Triangle Gourd Patch since 2022.  She has recently started teaching and enjoys helping her students create beautiful art.

---

I started a significant interest in Art in high school in a time when women usually ended up as teachers or nurses. I worked as a Candy Striper in the local hospital and decided that was not for me. I took an art class my senior year and found I liked the smell of the art room and decided I would major in art education. I have been teaching art of one kind or another since then. I discovered gourd art about 20 years after moving to Florida and realized it is the most diverse media of any I have experienced. I’ve been teaching different gourd classes for adults and kids since then. I’ve been a director for our state and the editor of our state news quarterly newsletter, and this year, I started the Tampa Bay Patch where I live.

---

I am a member of Triangle Gourd Patch. Judi Fleming is responsible for getting me started in the gourd hobby, which I have participated in since the 2018 Festival in Raleigh. I enjoy all sorts of crafts.

I have a deep personal love and enjoyment for Halloween as an all-out-fun night I hope for kids. I also want them to remember when they came to my home. I enjoy when someone comments in that way because I go all-out. It is an all-October-thing for me- and never the same each year.

---