Category: Featured Artist

Meet The Maker: Hailey Linette

My name is Hayley. I am an artist, designer and owner of Hayley Linette. I create hand-crafted/hand-painted accessories designed to bring a little happiness into the world. I grew my business from a dream to be different in the art and fashion industry. With that came my plan to design and develop handmade products incorporating all of my passions – painting, sculpting, sewing, and fashion design. With my infamous crazy, colorful patterns, I believe art should be fun and functional.

I hand paint onto faux leather vinyl and sew the painted vinyl into wallets, wristlets, clutches, cross body bags, and tote bags in my studio located in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I also create earrings, necklaces and tassel key chains made with clay and left over vinyl scraps. Each design I produce is completely individual. My goal is to keep my designs unique, fresh, and forever evolving. I am inspired by current fashion trends, vintage patterns, and color.

Website: HayleyLinette.com
Instagram: @hayley.linette
Facebook Page: Hayley Linette

May 9, 2017
Meet The Maker: Ron Nicole

Photo by: Lianne Dunsing http://www.liannedunsingphoto.com

Hello, my name is Ronni Robinson. I am the artist behind Ron Nicole. I create unique botanical sculptures, herbariums, and stationary. I work out of my tiny apartment here in Philadelphia which I share with my husband, as well as our crazy cat and dog. Our living room doubles as my art studio.

Last year I became aware of a technique called Ikebana (the Japanese art of flower arrangement). Inspired by botanicals and their delicate nature, I began to study everything about them, the way they hang, their texture and their fine details. I’ve always been drawn to nature so it’s no surprise that all of my art is centered around flowers.

When first coming up with this idea, I knew that I wanted to name each collection after a woman who inspired and pushed me to get here. It was my small way of saying thank you. I named my first collection Dorothy after my mother-in-law. At the time she was battling cancer but somehow always found the energy to offer words of encouragement and even helped get me art supplies.

I just recently finished my new collection called Raychelle. This series is named after my sister, who has always been a driving force in my creative thinking.

Whether I’m working on my own collection or preserving a bridal bouquet, I think about how I want the flowers to be arranged together. Just like a florist, a lot of thought goes into the design of the finished piece. I think about each flower and the imprint they will leave in the clay. Each flower placement is purposeful. I start by rolling the clay out until it is smooth and even. Then I press the arranged flowers into the clay, creating a deep impression. Then the flower has to be removed (often with tweezers) before pouring a blend of plaster and cement into the mold. After that, I wait…

I’m obsessed with flower preservation, so making art from my dried flower collection was a must do. They are not traditional herbariums. The white space around them creates a simplicity that’s easy on the eyes. Just like my botanical sculptures, I wanted to create something that would reflect my personal style. I want my art to embody the perfect balance of understated beauty and simplicity of design. My work speaks in soft tones. It doesn’t overwhelm or demand a room full of attention, instead it is humble enough to exist in the background.

This is my first year at the Art Star Craft Bazaar and I’m beyond excited. You’ll find me at booth #113. I hope you’ll stop by and say hello.

www.ronnicole.com
Instagram: @iamRonNicole

May 4, 2017
Meet The Maker: Raisha

Hi I’m Raisha (rhymes with Asia).

I’m an illustrator living in New York City. I mostly work from my home in Brooklyn- with all of my fun art junk crammed into this desk here.

I keep all of my ideas in a sketchbook. It’s like building a personal universe that is populated with drawings- it’s full of regular mundane things but that world is strange and wild and colorful.

I pick my favorite ideas and clean up the rough sketches. The colors need to be on separate layers for silkscreens.

When I was studying illustration at school, I always wanted to do more than just draw on paper. I started working in the printshop at The School of Visual Arts where I also experimented with sewing and mixed media work.

Screen printing is one of my favorite mediums because you can turn a flat design into a 3D object. I enjoy drawing but the real love comes from seeing the work transformed into a “something”. I want people to have fun with my art- squish it or wear it or throw it at your friend.

In the future I’d like to use my larger work for collaborations with other artists- things like video art or window installations. In the meantime, I have some interesting apartment decorations.

Come visit me at booth 121 at this year’s Spring Art Star Craft Bazaar!

Raisha.com // IG: @raisha.mf // etsy.com/shop/RaishaMF

May 1, 2017
Meet The Maker: Carolyn Keys

Hello I’m Carolyn, of Carolyn Keys! I’m a designer and maker based in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I share a wonderful studio in the woods with my husband Justin, who is a sculptor and metalsmith.

I’ve been making things with my hands since a young age when my father engaged me in wood shop projects that sparked my curiosity for materials, processes and design.

Though creating with my hands was always my first love, I decided that design was a more practical field to pursue, so that’s how I ended up studying interior design at Drexel University. I went on to work for design/build firms in and around Philadelphia, working on diverse projects from historical Bucks County renovations, to modern glass and steel homes. In 2015, after spending 10 years as an architectural designer, I started to feel the need to get back into the shop. Though I still love the complex puzzle of architecture and building systems, I wanted to get back to the simple act of making. In December of 2015, I decided to leave my full time job and give it a go, thus Carolyn Keys was born.

To be honest, in the beginning I didn’t even know exactly what to focus on. In the past I’ve made lighting fixtures and furniture, ceramics and printed textiles, abstract watercolors, and lamp work beads, to name a few. For several months, I just let myself experiment with lots of mediums to see what clicked. I started making simple modern jewelry that incorporated metal and wood elements. I loved how each piece was a small contained project, a sort of mini-sculpture that could be worn. I also found that I had fans eager to support my jewelry endeavor, so that has become my primary focus.

My process for making jewelry starts with many sketches of design ideas. This helps with figuring out the scale and proportion of pieces, and deciding what’s worth trying out in real materials. Depending on the design, my next steps involve hand cutting sheets of metal into shapes; cutting, bending and hammering wire; cutting tiny wood pieces out on a bandsaw, then sanding and shaping them. That’s followed up with lots of buffing and polishing of the parts before they get assembled into the final piece.

I’ve also been experimenting with etching, which is a process of drawing a resist onto metal then submerging it into an acid that eats away at the metal to leave a pattern. Once the etching is done, I blacken the piece and then buff it back to enhance the pattern.

I love how jewelry allows me to work with various materials and to learn new techniques. Having my own business keeps every day interesting whether I’m in the studio making, photographing new work, updating my website, or meeting interesting new people at an art show. I currently have work available at the lovely Art Star shop in Northern Liberties, and I’m excited to participate in my first Art Star Craft Bazaar, come visit me at booth #99!

April 27, 2017
Meet the Maker: PinBox 3000

We admit it. We’re not you’re typical craft market vendors. We’re the Cardboard Teck Instantute from Burlington Vermont. We are here to Tilt the Future with our PinBox 3000.

Pinbox3000

Our journey begins with a back story of ten years of puppetry, interactive sculpture, cheap art, and costuming. The process would begin in the dumpster, picking out a choice slice of corrugated board. But in the winter of 2015, we set out to achieve the utterly impractical- a cardboard tabletop pinball machine kit, the PinBox 3000. Our goal is not just to make single works of interactive, playable art. We want to inspire making with the versatility, strength, and accessibility of cardboard. The PinBox 3000 provides a platform for artists to design their own pinball-inspired dioramas, and to share those games with a larger maker and craft community.

Starting with access to a laser cutter at our local maker space, we were able to convert our hand-cut shapes into vector file images and then into laser cut prototypes, allowing us the opportunity to test run multiple iterations in the same day. Two crowdfunding campaigns landed us at the doorstep of a box manufacturer in Philadelphia where the die-cut PinBox 3000 hit the assembly line and began wide distribution. We’ve successfully brought the PinBox 3000 into retail, maker faires, summer camps, after school programs, STEM curriculums, and art classrooms with inspiring results.

What is amazing about the PinBox 3000 is its ability to accept all types of materials as well as makers. Craft supplies and electronics equally share space in our designs and creations. We’ve been working alongside artists to develop interchangeable playboards that are produced for limited runs. As artists who have struggled for years to merge our educational experience with our artistic practice, we finally discovered one singular strategy: business start-up. Our mission to Tilt the Future means bringing DIY culture to more households, empowering users to enjoy the process of making, crafting, and playing through designing their own ArtCade with the PinBox 3000.

The Cardboard Teck Instantute consists of professors Pete Talbot and Ben t. Matchstick. Our home in Burlington VT is a hive of innovative educators, makers, inventors, game designers, and artists, who all lend support to the PinBox 3000 process. Not to mention the adults who also occasionally have an idea or two for us! We are honored to share this Philadelphia-made art/craft/game/kit/toy to the world, and we’re proud to call the City of Brotherly Love our hatchery for this low-tech, kinetic, and eco-friendly game system, the PinBox 3000. Tilt the Future!

Find our more at pinbox3000.com. Come by our booth at the upcoming Art Star Craft Bazaar to flip out at our PinBox 3000 ArtCade.

April 24, 2017
Meet the Maker: Rosa Murillo of Muro Jewelry

Hello my name is Rosa, I am an Architect, Artist and Metalsmith specializing on colorful 3D wearable art. I use all kind of materials such as metals, wood and resin to bring my designs to life. My husband Ruben joined me a couple years ago, after realizing I needed some help with all the work a small business requires; he became my sales and marketing guru. His background in Chemical engineering has been an asset as I develop new concepts and play with different materials. Together we are Muro Jewelry.

I grew up in Mexico in a beautiful city set on a valley surrounded by mountains that are so close you feel like you could reach out and touch them. My work is largely inspired by the mountains, recreating little landscapes with natural wood and encasing them in resin.
My work is also inspired by the geometry in architecture, which is my college degree. In architecture I learned about proportions, how form follows function, and what the object wants to be versus what we want it to be. I find myself applying all of these concepts in making 3D wearable art pieces. It’s been surprising to me the way that life works out that way.

The resin and wood pendants that I make start their life as reclaimed wood that has been treated with resin in order to protect it from moisture, and then colored resin fills out all the beautiful peaks and valleys of the natural shape of the wood. I cut the wood/resin combo in smaller pieces with a saw and then decide how to showcase the uniqueness of each. Using a table sander, I shape each individual piece and then carefully sand them with 6 different grits of sand paper in order to achieve transparency and smoothness. The final steps are polishing and drilling in order to hang each piece from a chain that complements the color of the wood and resin.

Another aspect of my creative process is the use of Metalsmith techniques to create silver and brass frames to make earrings, rings and necklaces that I fill with hand pigmented resin. I like the freedom to make any shape and color I can think of.

We live in a small town in North Carolina with our three kids. My studio backs to the most beautiful woods where inspiration abounds.

This will be our first time participating in Art Star Bazaar, and we can’t wait!
www.murojewelry.com

April 20, 2017
Meet the Maker: Casey Lynch of Squirrel Tacos

Hello! I am Casey Lynch and my company is Squirrel Tacos.

I grew up in Philadelphia near a small woods and a pond with parents that encouraged nature and art to be part of our lives. As a kid I was in love with all things paper, and burned through a couple blender motors trying to make my own paper pulp. After a few years of traveling and living in Idaho I finished my degree in ceramics at Penn State.

The first time I saw a papercut I was at The Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show and I was transfixed. I had found my craft. Paper cutting was not popular at the time and I spent endless hours searching the internet for more information. I learned that it is also known as Kirigama or Scherenschnitte, first came to the U.S as a Pennsylvania Dutch folk tradition and is typically circular and symmetrical. Somehow I wanted to be a paper cutter but not in the traditional style, I wanted to carve free form without using classic iconography. Eventually, I taught myself using a craft knife and dozens of different blades until finally settling on a trusty #11 blade and a Martha Stewart handle.

Coming from a sculptural background, working in 2D has presented challenges. My process is to draw out the design and cut away the negative space from a single sheet of archival paper. Once the cut is complete I play with different ways the design can add dimension using shadows. I’ve worked with glass lockets, deep set frames, intricate layered portraits which build dimension, and I’ve had typographical collections; however, the wildlife and nature series are my signature lines. Those pieces are layered in shadowbox frames with National Park Service photographs placed deep enough in the frame to encourage closer inspection.

Today I live in New Jersey, once again surrounded by woods and water. Many hundreds of blades, experiments, disasters, and triumphs have contributed to the personality of my work. I aim to marry my love of all things paper, with my reverence for the outdoors, the tiny and great creatures around me, and the world beyond.

My company, Squirrel Tacos, is named for a tiny squirrel who has a fondness for eating taco shells at our kitchen window, he is one of many backyard characters that finds their way into my papercuts. I also have pygmy goats, a couple of ginger cats, and a litany of wild creatures keeping me guessing with paw prints and tracks.

I am beyond thrilled to be a first time vendor at Art Star Craft Bazaar, come and visit me in booth #90!

April 18, 2017
Meet The Maker: Kristin Myers

Hello! Greetings from an 18 mile sandbar that hugs the Atlantic Ocean. My name is Kristin, and I am a visual artist living in Surf City, NJ. It’s a beautiful place to live and is a constant source of inspiration. I haven’t always been an ocean inspired artist, however. In fact, I grew up outside of Philadelphia, and had early ambitions of becoming a cartoonist like my favorite artist, Charles Schultz.

While I spent the majority of my youth drawing cartoons, I also spent my summers at the beach fine tuning my deep appreciation of the ocean. I have been a surfer since before I wore a training bra and always figured I would grow up to be a famous beach loving, surfing cartoonist. Well, that sort of happened…

I received my BFA and MFA from great art schools where I studied the masters of art throughout history, the rules of color theory, compositional techniques, the theory of art (a whole lot of b.s. in my opinion) and why every artist feels the need to use the word “juxtaposition” to describe their art. I loved being an art student, even though I wasn’t the best student. If I’m being honest, I would have to admit that I regularly cut class to go surfing whenever the swell was up. What can I say? The ocean and art have always been my two greatest loves. After a total of seven years in an academic setting, three years working in a gallery, three years teaching college level classes, countless travels to foreign countries with coastlines still striving to find that perfect wave, I think only recently have I finally started to figure out what makes an artist, and more importantly, who I am.

Not surprisingly, my art has always been about the ocean. Drawing and the ocean are my true passions, as they are intricately connected. My drawings are about fusing that connection with meticulously detailed lines and an attention to the fluid spontaneity of the ocean. (there’s the art school/academic coming out in me!) Sometimes my art incorporates some of my favorite ocean themed stories such as: Moby Dick or Jaws. Other times, I am more interested in describing my last perfect wave or a recent trip to a new coast in as much detail as a .005 micron pen will permit. Almost all of my art is in some varying color blue and involves ink salt washes, repetitive wave patterns or an obscene amount of detailed lines. I also build my own frames, which are made from found and scavenged wood. I am always on the hunt for unique and weathered looking wood. A sea weathered piece of driftwood makes an absolutely perfect frame to display the great white whale attacking the Essex and if you don’t know the reference, I can’t help you.

When I’m not hunched over a new drawing in my studio, I can be found walking the shores of my local beach, surfing or playing with my dogs. And if you are wondering what happened to that little girl who wanted to create the next generation of Snoopy and share it with the world, don’t worry, she is still very much apart of who I am today. In fact, I love dogs and doodles so much that I even paint doggie portraits in my spare time. So maybe I didn’t become a famous cartoonist, but I am still the beach going, surfing, doodler that I was so long ago.

This will be my first Art Star Craft Bazaar and I’m stoked for this new experience. I will be selling original paintings and drawings, prints of my originals and handmade frames, so come out and visit me at booth #79 this Mother’s Day Weekend.

April 14, 2017
Meet the Maker: Kerry + Neil Stavely of Horse and Hare

Horse and Hare are me, Kerry Stavely, and my husband Neil Stavely. We started working under this name in 2008 when we opened our Etsy shop, pulling it from our Chinese Zodiac signs. I am the Horse and Neil is the Hare.

Neil and I met in Memphis, Tennessee while attending art school in the late nineties and have basically been together ever since. We later moved to Winchester, Virginia where we continue to work and live to this day. We do our work mostly out of our home but also have a gallery/handmade retail store here called Tin Top which serves as a home base for us to showcase our work as well as the work of other artists and crafters from around the U.S. We have some studio space there as well and our beloved letterpress lives there too.

Although our work is rooted in linoleum and wood block printing, neither of us focused on the medium very much in school; we came to it as a way to work on smaller projects that we could easily pick up or put away when our daughter was young. We started off just doing linocut prints but it grew from there and has since evolved; exploiting the medium in more experimental and playful ways, creating mixed media works and semi-sculptural assemblages and carved paintings. Now we do everything from commissioned design work, to our own prints, wearables and home goods to one of a kind fine art pieces.

The subjects of our are work are pulled from history, literature, occult/spiritual symbolism and iconography, and the natural world. We like to blur the line between art vs. craft, low brow vs. high brow. Despite the diversity of content, the work is tied together stylistically which primarily comes from the block printing medium but also from our approach.

A lot of people ask us if we work collaboratively on pieces. Usually we do not. Although we think of ourselves as team, our collaborative process is mainly on the conceptual level, whether it’s bouncing ideas off each other or giving each other constructive criticism. On occasion we might work on the same piece but it’s pretty rare – we both have a hard time relinquishing that control!Again our work is tied together due to the nature of the medium but our styles are pretty different. Neil’s work tends to be more controlled and illustrative whereas my work is rougher and more expressionistic. All in all though, I think we work pretty well together!

Neil and I, on average, only do a couple art fairs a year. This will be our first adventure to Art Star and Philadelphia together, we are really excited about it!

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Find Horse and Hare at our Upcoming Fall Art Star Craft Bazaar on Nov. 7th + 8th. or visit their website here

October 20, 2015
Meet ASCB Vendor Tadpole Creations!

Some of us are born makers. I was fortunate to come from highly creative stock and was raised in an environment that fostered creativity. I was born to a family with kitchen designer parents and a fine artist older sister. Some of my earliest memories are of playing with clay in my mother’s studio or sewing bits of fabric together from her sewing room to make clothes for my dolls.

A consistent thread throughout my life has been living the life as a maker. I have always made stuff – whether it be with a paintbrush or a sewing needle in my hand.

Looking back – I have always traversed between painting and various fiber arts.
My college degree is a BS in Art Education with a minor in Fiber Arts. I worked as an elementary art teacher and decorative painter before the establishment of Tadpole Creations.

You could also say appreciating the importance of a child’s viewpoint has influenced my life as a maker. This carries over to this day, from the fabrics I choose for a product, to the method of construction.

The murals, quilts, clothing and critters I made for my own three children when they were very young provided the foundation for the beginnings
of the Tadpole Creations brand.

Moo-Cow – the earliest known Tadpole Creation. Made almost 18 years ago for my oldest child.

A popular new baby gift from present day – the elephant rattle – tails and seams are reinforced for durability, the ears are corduroy for tactile exploration.

A denim whale pillow – having great unisex designs along with classic girl and boy offerings gives my buyers a choice when deciding on the perfect gift.

A linen and Liberty of London bunny rabbit toy. Featuring a hand painted and stitched face.

My hope is that my creations are the ones that are well loved by your little ones, that some receive the greatest honor of becoming a childhood treasure. Like Moo Cow.

Home goods are a more recent addition to my line, as I expand beyond the baby goods market. Such as these linen and Liberty of London pillows.

My newest home products are hand painted pillows, each is one of a kind.

The best part of my job is getting to meet my buyers and hear about the little ones in their lives. I hope that we have an opportunity to meet at a future market!

xo
Renee D’Amico
Tadpole Creations
Visit her at our Upcoming Art Star Craft Bazaar in Asbury Park – Booth #8

July 23, 2015