I got engaged in 2009 knowing nothing about weddings. Local florists told me what I "had" to do - none of it felt like us. So I made flowers for my own wedding using visual merchandising skills and a high school flower shop job. I loved it. Working at an athletic apparel company where everyone was under 30, weddings felt like they were going to become a "thing."

I decided to learn everything I could about floristry and hung out my shingle in Philadelphia. Six months later, I was named Best Florist in Philly. For 15 years, I've designed luxury weddings and events, been featured in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Martha Stewart, and made lists of top florists to watch globally. My retail background made me a design chameleon - I can channel everyone from Hermès to Anthropologie for brand collaborations.

When COVID hit in 2020, my event clients postponed rather than compromise their vision. I was closed for 19 months. So I started DIYing a garden renovation at our formerly abandoned Mt. Airy home. I grew up in apartments and never picked up a shovel until 2018. Now I have a crazy, wild garden that's always in progress - you can see it on my YouTube channel with 7,000 subscribers. I even built a black and white greenhouse as an homage to my chic grandmother Joan.

August 2020 was too hot to garden. An algorithm showed me a video of someone throwing clay, and I thought "I could try making a vase" - I needed an indoor activity before I dropped from heat stroke. That simple idea launched four years of intensive learning: mold-making, clay chemistry, developing my own casting slip recipes, 3D scanning, modeling software, understanding printing technologies, building my own 3D printer. Everyone kept saying "3D printing," but what did I know? Google showed me miniatures and tchotchkes.

I had to learn to do everything I did with clay in my hands on a touchscreen in 3D software. Many ups and downs later, I have a line of limited-edition porcelain vases made in the USA - completely different from where I started, but exactly what they were supposed to be.

I live in Mt. Airy with my husband Tim and our clowder of cats. My current studio companion is Chewie, a munchkin Tortie who walks the garden with me and inspects every arrangement. Tim wishes I'd take up something lighter than 50-pound bags of clay and 3D printers the size of fridges.