I got engaged in 2009. I knew nothing about weddings. I met with florists in my area, and they told me what I “had” to do. None of it felt like us. So, I made flowers for my own wedding. My experience in visual merchandising and a high school job in a flower shop was what I had to use. I loved it. I worked as a Visual Merchandising exec at an athletic apparel company at the time, everyone was under 30. It felt like weddings were going to become a “thing”. 

I decided to learn everything I could about floristry and hung out my shingle on my floral studio in Philadelphia. I was named the Best Florist in Philly six months after opening. Now I've been a florist for 15 years. I’ve been featured in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Martha Stewart Weddings and Living, Flower Magazine, countless blogs and made the list of top florists to watch in the country and in the world. For 15 years I honed my skills in uniquely designed luxury weddings and events. I pride myself on my ability to get to the emotions behind words that clients use to describe what they want. 

My retail background makes me an ideal fit for brand clients, I’ve done trunk shows, recreated runway presentations in boutiques across the country, done live demonstrations for clients on how to use home décor items and created pop up flower shops in stores to gift flowers to customers. I’m a design chameleon able to channel the vibe of everyone from Hermes to Anthropologie.

 In 2020, my event clients postponed their events-preferring to wait to have the celebrations they envisioned. I ended up closed for 19 months. I started DIYing a garden renovation at our formerly abandoned home in Mt.Airy Philadelphia. I grew up in apartments, never even picked up a shovel till 2018. Now I have a crazy, wild garden always in progress and an experiment in creating living floral compositions within the landscape. You can see it on my YouTube which is garden focused. I even built a black and white greenhouse, an homage to my grandmother Joan who was so chic. 

In August 2020 it was hot, too hot to garden. An algorithm showed me a video of a gardener who went inside and threw a planter on his home potter’s wheel. I thought that I could try making a vase, I needed an indoor activity before I dropped from heat stroke. In person masked classes were about to resume at The Clay Studio. I signed up for the one topic I had never tried, Mold Making & Casting. I thought I was on my way to making simple, easily reproduced wholesale priced vases that I could sell to other florists. Until I took my first cast piece out of the mold. It was a revelation and something I should try to elaborate on in a Journal post soon. 

Then I made my first vase, so I had to learn the chemistry of clays and glazes. I learned to make my own recipes for casting slip. I learned how to design vases so that they would come out of the mold. I started making my original designs in wax sculpture clay instead of clay that dried out. I needed to try many ways of making my ideas before realizing my strength was in the design, the original models but I did not want to make multiples all day long. I’ve always known that I must be doing the things I’m best at and find the right people to do the things I struggle with. I started looking for a small manufacturer to make the vases in quantities greater than 1. 

I needed to work with a small batch manufacturer.

Two problems came up. One: I needed a way to get my wax clay originals to the mold maker.  And two: I needed a way to scale up the originals so that when the porcelain is fired and shrinks, sometimes as much as 20% the vases wouldn’t end up too small. 

You can’t ship wax clay, you can make a copy in plaster but that’s really fragile and heavy to ship. Everyone kept saying 3D printing but what did I know about that? If you google it you find miniatures, gaming and tchotchkes.

Basically it felt like starting over, I had to learn to do everything I did to a piece of clay in my hands and do it on a touchscreen drawing monitor in a 3D modeling software. I learned to 3D scan my sculptures and scale them, perfect them in software. I learned about types of 3D printing by having pieces printed by commercial print services. I learned what I needed in a printer, eventually bought one and learned to build it, tune it and print my sculptures so they could be molded. I’m proud to have figured all this out but it took a long time with many ups and downs. 

Here we are four years later, no not since you started reading this but since I took that first ceramics class. There are 3 models in the first collection drop with more on the way over the next year. They are limited edition and made in the USA. They are very different from where I started with the idea but they are what they were supposed to be. 

I live in Mt.Airy Philadelphia, USA with my husband Tim and our clowder of cats. Yes, that's what a pack of cats is called. I grew up in New York City, the Upper West Side but not the UWS of You’ve Got Mail, the UWS of Panic in Needle Park. NY has changed so much. I went to High School in NJ, moved to Philly to go to UArts, promptly dropped out and started working retail and then merchandising. 

For 30 years now, all my creative work has been done with a Tortie girl cat by my side, though I have also had many rescues over the years.

Mouse was my girl when I dropped out of art school and tried to figure out what to do with my life. She lived to almost 18 years old. Muppet came to live at my floral studio in 2013 and became my emotional support and my reason for dragging my ass into the studio even while going through some tough emotional times. When I moved the studio home, reducing the number of events- Muppet enjoyed a life of leisure with the rest of the cats before passing in 2021. Chewie, in the photo with me is a two-year-old munchkin Tortie who is my shadow, even walking in the garden with me and inspecting flowers as I design. She's a wonderful blend of both Mouse & Muppet's attitude and charm. She feels like a gift they sent me. She's named for Chewbacca, not the pet website. She was too small to carry the full name.

My husband Tim is endlessly supportive though he does wish I would take up something less heavy than 5 gallon buckets of water, 50LB bags of raw clay materials, plaster molds, 3D printers the size of a fridge and pallets of porcelain vases.