Wednesday, Dec. 24, 2008 | 12:01 a.m.
Gourds are fall plants, but the small indigenous desert variety can hang on Christmas trees just as easily.
At the Boulder City Art Center, instructors’ pottery, prints and gourd ornaments sold quickly during this year’s annual holiday sale.
The sale is held every year to allow instructors to sell items they create. The artists keep 70 percent and the center gets 30 percent of the proceeds. The sale this year made the center $120.
Mignon Slentz collects about 500 coyote melons in the desert and sometimes in her yard evrey year to dry and paint for ornaments.
The bulbous, seed-filled vegetables show mostly desert scenes or wildlife.
Slentz, who has taught art in Boulder City schools for almost 20 years and occasionally gives basket-weaving lessons at the Art Center, said she’s been selling the gourds for 15 years as far away as Sedona and Tucson, Ariz., Nipton, Calif., and St. George, Utah.
It started when she was driving past the dry lake bed and spotted what looked like a lemon or a tennis ball. She stopped to discover more of the cucumber-like coyote gourds growing under leaves.
Since then, she’s decorated and sold them for $10 each.
Cassie Tomlin can be reached at 948-2073 or [email protected].
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