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    Decorating for Christmas and the holidays might be one of the best traditions at the end of the year. For the founders of Set with Grace, Tammy Gera and Nina Seitz, helping others find their own distinctive holiday table décor is just as fun. “Recognizing that Christmas is a very personal holiday where families cherish tradition and unique customs passed down from generation to generation, we find ourselves creating a unique tablescape design for each of our hosts and hostesses,” Tammy says.

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    Catherine Hu, ecologist and natural science illustrator, didn’t set out to be an artist. “I’ve always enjoyed arts and crafts and being creative, but before painting plants, I never felt super inspired or motivated to do art consistently,” she reveals. Hu works full time as an ecologist, though for years she’s practiced and refined her art, painting for herself or making work she would gift to friends and family.

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    Art can have a powerful impact on a viewer, whether that’s inspiring feelings of sadness, joy, sublimity or wonder. Though her art does this and more, artist Adrienne Sandusky makes paintings meant to inspire conversation.

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    Douglas Dale has been working with yarn for a decade now, but they started using yarn to trace wood grains right around the height of Covid. “It was then that tracing wood with yarn was something rote and repetitive, and it just offered a good Zen activity,” they explain. It was also around the time that they started exploring ideas around gender and what it might mean to be nonbinary. “I really liked the metaphor of covering wood with yarn and making an object designed to encapsulate two different polarities of hard and soft, textile and wood, masculine and feminine.”

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    While growing up, Manchester artist Laura Lebeda hiked for miles in the woods behind her house. “The exploration and freedom of that gave me a respect and love of the outdoors. I remember in our yard watching in awe at the large lilac bush covered with Monarch butterflies,” she says.

    Now, Laura hopes that seeing her award-winning artwork will encourage people to explore and think about the strength, fragility and beauty of the natural world.

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    If you haven’t heard of Barry Kraft, you might be hanging around the wrong crowd. Sure, one of his earliest memories is burning down a barn. But for the record, it was his barn. And as the owner and designer of Reclaim Renew – a custom-furniture workshop that uses only reclaimed and salvaged wood – it should be mentioned he’s devastated by that memory now.  “I didn’t think it was tragic then,” Kraft says adjusting his baseball cap, “but now I’m like, ‘what was I doing?!’”

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