Summer Show Preview!

Meet Gabriele Colon from Gabi's Giftables...
I am Gabriele Colon, I was born and raised in Wiesbaden-Germany and have been in the USA for over 30 years. I have been crafting for over forty years and creating items for sale for the past twenty five years. My mom loved to craft and taught my sisters and I everything she knew.

I have always crafted off and on. But about 6 months ago it became something I wanted to commit myself to on a regular basis after a serious injury.  Sewing and creating crafts gives me joy and I love sharing that with as many people as possible. My family inspires me to create. My mother has passed and my sisters are living in Germany. When I am crafting I feel connected to them and the joy it brought my mom.

I started out crafting items for my own use and gifts. After seeing my creations, friends and family began coming to me for handcrafted items to be used for gifting, weddings, graduations and holidays. 

I am always thinking of new ideas and typically create a few test runs to iron out the details and perfect my visualization of the item. I don't use patterns or diagrams, I freehand all my creations. This is my first Avant-Garde Art and Craft Show and I am extremely excited for it!

Five years from now I see myself with a thriving online store featuring a large variety of hand sewn and handcrafted items for all of life's special moments.
9. Items crafted with care and love make more personalized and meaningful gifts then mass produced products.

Meet Kimberly Vassar from Kimberly Kouture bag...
My name is Kimberly Vassar and I am a native Ohioan. I was a professional
hairstylist for thirteen years and decided that I wanted to do something that I am truly passionate about, and that is start my own cosmetic company. I also love the whole creative process and this led me to paper crafting, which I thoroughly enjoy. 

I started making gift bags sometime last year. I am a fanatic you-tuber, and one day while watching I saw a few of my fellow crafters make purses from cardstock, and I thought they were really neat, but they needed a little something else. I made one, put my spin on it showed to my cousin and she fell absolutely in love with them and encouraged me to keep making the purses.

This will be my very first Avante-Garde Art and Craft Show. I am very excited and nervous. We always feel that our ideas are great, but it is others that makes our ideas a success. What inspire me to create is watching others create. I stated earlier that I love YouTube, and there are some very talented people on there. I watch them and think I can do that, and I can even take it a step further.

I’ve always loved arts and crafts for as long as I can remember. Whether I was in elementary school coloring, in high school drawing picture, or at my local recreation center painting ceramics, I found pleasure in creating things with my hands. 

As a young person I discovered that I love the whole creative process. As I got older I loved to see the transformation of anything go from “shabby” to "chic”. Now that I am older I have discovered that I am truly gifted on many levels, whether it be styling hair, drawing a picture, or paper crafting, there are many things that I am really good at. My creative process is I find a subject, say paper purse for instance. Then, I get a vision in my head how I would like the finished subject to look. Then, I shop around to see how I can make this vision come to pass. The finished product is not always what imaged, but for the most part it is successful. 

I'm not really sure where I see this five years from now. The thought now is a hobby. I have a cosmetic business called Brown Eyes and Tulips that is my primary focus. I am a lover of color and beauty. It gives a sense of tranquility and joy. My eyes smile when I am in that space, I actually feel peaceful. and that is what I want other people to see and feel when they experience one of my pieces, Peace, joy, happiness, and love when they see a Kimberly Kouture bag.

Meet Linda Rose... 
Painting is not a job for me. It is a passion that is like my lifeline. The more I paint the more I am motivated and it gives my life meaning and direction. I believe if we are given talent we need to share it in some way. 

My education includes studying Fine Arts at Ohio State University and taking numerous classes in oils and acrylics. One of these classes with Heart of Ohio Tole Painting (HOOT) led me to discover the world of gourd art. Of course I started by painting them, but soon discovered there were endless ways to use and decorate a gourd. From that time forward I have done wood burning and carving as well as putting two or more gourds together to form a gourd person or animal.

I especially like making bowls by cutting off the top of the Gourd, cleaning the inside, and painting or staining the outside. Then bowls look beautiful with a finished rim of some sort of weaving with materials like pine needles. It wasn’t long before I had more gourds than I knew what to do with, so I began selling them in gift shops and craft shows.

I met some very nice people at a Farmers Market. They wanted me to teach them about painting and gourds. That led me to teach classes in my home for about ten years. These people have become very good friends and now we paint together informally. We are all members of the Ohio Gourd Society and work to promote and educate people on growing, harvesting, and creating with gourds.

I enter my art in the Ohio State Fair competition and have won many ribbons including four Best of Show ribbons. Last year I won Best of Show at the Art Castle Gallery in Delaware County with my reverse class painting with pen and ink and oils.

I am a member of HOOT because without them I may have never been introduced to the world of gourds.

Meet Lydia Navatsyk of Little Ladies Soft Serve Ice Cream...
I'm Lydia and I am a curious soul, both a child and an old soul at heart. I'm married to a fellow old soul, and I'm the mother of two girls, Mabel and Ida. I'm a book-lover and an occasional writer and a constant cook. I love eating meals slowly in crowded, loud spaces. I'm suspicious of people who don't like to try new food. 

My husband and I have owned our soft serve business since 2018. We bought an old postal service truck in 2017, and since my husband's motto is "DIY or die," he spent the following winter and spring turning the truck into a soft serve truck. This is my also first Avant-Garde Art and Craft Show that I have ever been in and I am super excited to be apart of it! 

Necessity is what inspired us to start our business. We needed another way to make money. But a love of people and conversation is what inspires me to make delicious food and share it with others.  

The truth is, I'm not crafty at all! But I AM creative. I started cooking when I graduated college with an English degree and didn't know what else to do for work. I kept getting cooking jobs throughout my twenties and slowly came to realize that maybe I wasn't going to be an English professor after all and that maybe my future would involve cooking. 

I discovered my talent after I moved from Philadelphia to the rural Midwest in 2015, I realized that if I wanted to eat good food, I wasn't going to be able to leave my house and walk down the block to get it anymore. I was going to have to make it myself. Since moving, I've come to realize how much I love making food because it allows me to be creative but it's also so practical. And after starting our soft serve business, I knew I had found a perfect niche to use some of my creativity. Ice cream toppings are such a fun outlet for me, but they don't overwhelm me because they're not an entire meal!!!

I would describe my creative process as intuitive, seemingly slapdash, organized - but in a way that's completely impossible for others to perceive. In five years I see myself taking over the world with soft serve!!! The message I hope people see behind my work is pure joy!

Meet Ashley Roby from Michael Nichole at home...
I have been crafting for fun most of my life. Last year when faced with the challenge of creating a homemade item for a gift exchange, my personal hobby quickly became something I was excited to share with others! I started making burlap wreaths and am now also crafting with wood, canvas and paint. My husband acts as my personal 'wood craftsman', creating special pieces for each project. Re-purposing used treasures is something I am beginning to venture into.

In the next five years I see myself using more re-purposed items as the base for my designs. I also see myself joining more shows and working towards crafting as my primary "job", (If you can even call it that!).  Spending time at home in my favorite chair, looking out the window at the sunshine, trees and animals wipes away the stresses of the day and opens my mind to design ideas. 

I have found a true passion for creating special home decor pieces that possess a welcoming, warm feeling. I will be participating in my first Avant-Garde show in June as well. I have attended a previous event as a guest and am excited to join such a special group of artists!

2019 Columbus Summer Avant-Garde Art & Craft Show

Sunday, June 9th, 2019 - 10:00am-4:00pm

Makoy Center

5462 Center Street

Hilliard, Ohio 43026

For more information, contact Amanda Look, Event Coordinator at Amanda@ag-shows.com

Visit us on:

FACEBOOK

TWITTER

PINTEREST

LINKEDIN

INSTAGRAM