What inspired us was the desire to use our knowledge of plants and nature to enrich people's lives with our products! We are a small start-up brand with a ton of dreams, but at the moment very little funding to make the business a real endeavor. This grant would help us become a sustainable brand and reduce our expenses considerably for the Winter 2026 market season, as well as give us the opportunity to give back to some of our favorite charities this holiday season! The trajectory for our brand has always been to reach more people with our products, and to help more people by proxy.

I decided to grow my artistic abilities and turn it into a laser/engraving business that I just started this year. I’ve been artistic all my life since I was a child drawing and painting, but I’ve found a passion combining those skills along with my laser engraving. I wanted to expand my crafts I do and sell for everyone to see. I said to myself, if you don’t try you will never know if you’re chosen to participate. I started as a child and art just became natural to me. I would enter my drawings in the art shows at school, and when I was in high school my art was selected for the cover of the school/church's Christmas card. That was awesome!! This is vital to my work because it allows me to be creative and grow in my talents.

I have been an artist for as long as I can remember, although my path to becoming a professional fine artist has not been linear. For nearly 30 years, I worked as a floral designer, eventually building my own wedding and event floral business for the last 15 years in Arizona. That career allowed me to make a living through flowers, color, composition, and beauty, while painting continued alongside it. After losing my mother to brain cancer in 2019, I returned to painting with a deeper sense of purpose and as a form of grief therapy. Over the past several years, it became clearer that I wanted painting to become the focus of my next chapter. In 2026, I made the decision to step away from my floral business and devote myself to building a sustainable career as a fine artist. My current work combines botanical imagery with folk-art influences, pattern, and symbolism. I am especially interested in the visual language of flowers and plants across cultures and in using the natural world to explore transformation, resilience, abundance, and becoming. This opportunity is key because I am at a true transition point, moving from my floral career into a full-time studio practice.

My artistic experience is that I have put my all and everything into my work and this journey of working with feathers as my medium. I wanted to create something with my own energy, a woman after her own dreams and bringing life to her creative thoughts and visions. I have a deep connection to feathers and their symbolism. It feels like my soul’s work, as the creative energy flows through me; meditating, praying, and learning, to create these. My pieces connect people to nature and the specific energy of that bird. They carry it with them as they wear them or work with them in the case of smudge fans. I had money saved from prior jobs and invested in myself. I bought all the pieces and parts as I could over the years, and have collected feathers in a conscious way.

I have loved art throughout my life and always dreamed of turning a creative passion into a career. For years, I worked jobs that never quite lit me up, and then came motherhood—a role I love deeply, but one that made finding time to paint while raising four children a challenge. A few years ago, I converted our garage into a studio and began building the career I had long imagined. In August, I hired childcare to give me regular studio hours—possibly the least glamorous but most important investment I have made in my art. As it turns out, painting in good morning light with my sanity intact is very different from squeezing it into the dark of midnight. This is my time to give my work the attention it deserves, contribute financially to my family, and show my children the importance of pursuing what matters to them. And when I come in from the studio, with paint and smiles on my face, ready to give my kids big, energized hugs, I am whole.

The Fountain Festival of Fine Arts & Crafts is really my first step toward turning my art into a business. For years, I have created simply because I love creating, but the response to my feather work has encouraged me to see what I make in a different way. People are drawn to the beauty, individuality and purpose of my feather smudge fans, and their encouragement helped me realize there may be a larger audience for my work. I pursued stained glass for a number of years, and that training gave me a lasting appreciation for craftsmanship, color, detail and the beauty of handmade work. As life changed and family became my priority, I eventually stepped away from glass, but I never stepped away from creating. Over the years, I continued exploring different mediums for my own enjoyment. About seven years ago, when I began working with feathers, something clicked. I felt I had found a medium that was uniquely mine, and people began responding very positively to the work.

My work is built around transformation. I use reclaimed steel, vintage hardware, architectural fragments, and discarded industrial objects, often keeping their rust, wear, old paint, and imperfections visible. I am interested in taking something that has lost its original purpose and turning it into a piece that feels intentional, sculptural, and completely different from what it was before. My background in interior design influences the way I think about proportion, balance, scale, and how a sculpture relates to the space around it. As my work has developed, I have moved from experimenting with individual found objects to creating a broader range of work, from small hand-welded flowers to substantial freestanding sculptures.

Art is something that has been in my life from an early age as my parents always encouraged me to pursue it in any form. I’ve always been drawn to the creative side of life and trying out new forms of art, whether that’s with taking classes or trying something new on my own. In 2022 I was looking to try something new and my parents had just had a custom stained glass piece made. After a few years of making things for family and friends, I felt more confident with where my skills were at and wanted to pursue selling my pieces. Stained glass has such a magical feel to it and being able to bring ideas to life with this medium can be challenging at times, but a lot of fun! It’s a slow craft and each piece takes multiple steps to complete. Watching your idea come together with each step and then seeing the final piece at the end is the ultimate reward.

I began my artistic journey just two and a half years ago, initially with a simple goal: to create paintings for my own home. I never imagined that my artwork would find its way into the homes of others, much less that it would become something I would pursue as an artist. I have always felt a need to create, exploring many different forms of art throughout my life. But there is something magical about painting that feels different. In painting, I discovered a medium that allows me to fully express myself through color, movement, shape, and emotion. After encouragement from family and coworkers, and especially the enthusiastic response I received from people who saw my work at Tempe, I am finally beginning to believe what others have been telling me: my art has the ability to connect with and bring joy to people beyond my immediate circle.

I have been creative my entire life, but 18 months ago, I made the conscious decision to transition from a corporate career to focus on my art full-time. My work involves a meticulous process of preserving botanicals to create lasting, multi-dimensional art. I combine my experience in painting, resin casting, and composition with the delicate art of botanical preservation, effectively freezing time and transforming ephemeral, cut flowers into lasting works of art. I have been creating art for as long as I can remember, approaching every aspect of my life through an artistic lens. It began unexpectedly when I started salvaging flowers from the trash at my sister’s floral shop. I saw potential where others saw waste, and I began experimenting with pressing and preserving these botanicals to create unique pieces of art. As I refined my craft, I shared my work in local online groups, which led to an organic influx of inquiries from brides looking to preserve their wedding bouquets.