Every year the Bluemont Fair Crafts Jury selects one artisan from the more than one hundred winning juried crafters to be our First Place winner. This artisan is judged to have the most unique craft as well as overall best exhibit during the Fair and is awarded a blue ribbon and a free space at the following year's Fair. In 2002 our first place winner was Angela Mohr, lovingly known as Gourdgal. Her home grown, dried, designed, and decorated gourds are truly works of art. Here is a little bit of information about our winner

Angela Mohr discovered her artistic leanings early in life when she found an embroidery box in the bottom of her mother's dresser. Later, while attending the School of Design at North Carolina State University, she launched her art career by designing ads for the student newspaper. She worked as a book designer for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and then for the book clubs at the Weekly Reader in Connecticut before moving with her husband and son to Virginia. They now reside in Stephens City.

Moving to Virginia opened new artistic avenues to Angela. She started growing gourds in her suburban garden and producing interesting jars and bowls from fruits of the labor! Although a small hobby at first, Gourdgal is now a growing home business that has branched into new areas such as gardening lectures, motivational writing and speaking, spring plant and seed sales, various art fair exhibitions, one-man shows at art galleries, and soon, gourds for civil war reenactments.

As a member of the American Gourd Society, Guild of American Papercutters, and The Ring of Tatters, Angela incorporates these differing disciplines in her art. Her enthusiasm for gourd art inspired Eddie Richard from Richard's Fruit Market in Stephens City to spearhead the First Annual Virginia Gourd Festival — a man with a market and land, joined a woman with quirky ideas and wow, a festival was born and succeeded!

Because Angela chooses to maintain Gourdgal as a small, one-person operation, she only attends a handful of shows a year. The Bluemont Fair is one show she enjoys very much and plans to attend as one of the regular vendors. Some of her artistic themes carry forth from year to year for those that collect, but there's always something unusual coming along such as her newest creation — hand-cranked, mechanical gourd toys. Wait 'til you get a look at those!