By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Gayle Brim and Laura Miller love to create crafts.
Brim, of Findlay, admits it’s hard for her not to be making something. “For me I have to be doing something with my hands,” she said. “I can’t even sit through a two-hour movie without doing something. It keeps our creative juices flowing and when you have the creative juices and you don’t let them flow you get stifled.”
Those creative juices have nourished a new joint venture by the friends, Joyful Creations Studio and Boutique LLC, at 188 S. Main St., Suite 1 in downtown Bowling Green. After a delay because of the COVID-19 closures, the shop will open Tuesday, May 12, at 11 a.m.
Miller and Brim have been friends for a number of years, and shared their love of crafts.
Miller said she remembers doing crafts as a child. She found new inspiration during a trip with her husband to Nags Head, North Carolina in 2016. They wandered into a shop that sold wire jewelry. She loved how the pieces looked and was fascinated by the process.
The shop was offering a class, so she took it.
When she came back, she shared her new-found skill with Brim.
Brim is a long-time crafter. As she was raising her family in Arizona she made Christmas and birthday presents.
She loves to paint, including miniatures that are now turned into the covers of memory boxes and into greeting cards.
Together Brim and Miller brought their crafts to fairs, and people would often ask them if they had a shop.
Now they do. Everything sold in Joyful Creations is the product of their hands and imaginations, and almost all of it uses repurposed items – old postcards, the springs from clothespins, cigar boxes, envelopes.
While the idea for a shop had already been planted, it came to fruition one afternoon when they traveled to Bowling Green to visit their favorite shop, Asherah’s Garden, where they get many of the stones for their jewelry. Then they stopped by Coyote Beads. Walking back from their car, they spotted the empty storefront.
They could imagine it during Black Swamp Arts Festival weekend.
It was small 350-square-feet, but enough for their stock and a space to offer workshops. “Just enough to start,” Miller said.
She remembered coming to the shop with her mother when it was Merle Norman Cosmetic Studio.
By early March the studio was packed with their creations – fairy gardens, memory boxes, jewelry, cards and more, as they made final preparations to open. The date had not yet been set when retail except for essentials went into hiatus, and downtown resembled a ghost town.
But with the limited opening for retail set for Tuesday, they will open their doors, following the appropriate social distancing. No more than three customers will be allowed in at a time.
Joyful Creations will offer items in a variety of price points, depending on materials and the amount of time invested in the creation.
“We want this to be the kind of shop that if somebody forgets to get something for somebody’s birthday they’ll to be able to come in, look around and find something in their price range,” Miller said.
And nothing will be exactly the same. Even if someone wants a copy of bracelet or necklace they can make another, Miller said. “But it won’t be exact.”
The shop will be open Tuesdays through Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., though they will be flexible on their hours, extending them for special events.
Brim said she recalled working in the shop when a workshop at Coyote Beads, just a few doors down let out, and all the women who’d been there went walking right by their door and up the alley.
They’d want to be open on such a night, they thought.
For now, it will be the two of them running the show, though, that may change, they said, as the business grows and prospers.
