Featured artistJoanne eschrichJULY 2015

Beautiful You - 2015 Porcelain ornament benefiting Susan G. Komen®

When Joanne Eschrich works on an ornament, she can find inspiration almost anywhere. But her greatest source of inspiration will always be her family and friends.

“When I’m working on ornaments that celebrate or support a particular cause, I always try to think of someone in my own life who would appreciate this,” Joanne said.

So when this year’s ornament benefiting Susan G. Komen project began, she immediately thought of her sister Laurie, who lost her battle with breast cancer a decade ago. “As I was working on this ornament, I thought, ‘What would Laurie love?’”

She still keeps in touch with Laurie’s friends back home, south of Boston, which helps keep those memories at the top of her mind. She also has a friend who works at Hallmark who is a breast cancer survivor, and so Joanne asked her opinion of the ornament.

When Joanne started sketching concepts, the faces of her angel figures seemed too serene and serious. “I wanted it to be more subtle.” So she shifted her focus to only the wings, which form the shape of a heart when viewed from the other side.

Joanne, a Keepsake artist since 1996, said she wanted it to be something encouraging, “something you looked at it just made you feel good.”

The final design was crafted out of porcelain. Komen’s familiar Running Ribbon appears as a small charm studded with rhinestones. The message on the ornament: “Be inspired by the beauty of your own strength.”

In 2015 and 2016, Hallmark will donate $2 from each specially designed Keepsake Ornament sold to Susan G. Komen® with a combined minimum guaranteed donation of $75,000. The Running Ribbon is a registered trademark of Susan G. Komen.

Featured artistJoanne eschrichJULY 2015

Light and Love - 2015 In partnership with CaringBridge

Just as with the Beautiful You ornament, Joanne pictured someone dear to her when creating the Light and Love ornament.

“I was thinking of another friend of mine here at Hallmark. She had been through a really bad accident,” Joanne said. “That’s the first time I learned about CaringBridge, how it not only brings everyone together to help a particular person but also helps everyone stay on top of their progress and healing.”

For the design, she chose a butterfly, one of nature’s most enduring symbols of transition and transformation. The many colors represent the many wonderful people and positive influences in someone’s life and how they become even more important in times of crisis.

Joanne thought the finished ornament should be made out of glass, which made it a little tougher to imagine during the rough initial stages when she was sculpting and casting the design in plastic. But she’s proud of how it turned out.

This year’s ornament marks the first Keepsake collaboration with CaringBridge.“It’s been a really rewarding experience, so I hope we continue to do that.”

Be You - 2015 Believe in Yourself

The idea behind this ornament was pretty simple: create a lovely little piece of inspiration for the young women in pretty much anyone’s life.

“We were trying to make it widely appealing, so that anyone’s daughter or granddaughter would like it,” Joanne said.

And it turns out Joanne had the best test audience possible: her two daughters, 18 and 22 years old, one graduating from high school in May and the other graduating from college. “They can be pretty critical, but they both liked it,” Joanne said.

The message on the ornament is: “Believe in yourself.” Within those inspirational words, the “BE” and the “YOU” have been highlighted to create a separate but equally empowering message-within-a-message.

For the main part of the design, Joanne and her engineering counterparts settled on a mirrored effect similar to how it’s created in greeting cards, with a transparent acrylic and a silvery film. A 3-dimensional butterfly rests on top of the mirror, which is also bordered with rhinestones, a trend that Joanne had picked up on recently.

She said she had begun to notice that a lot of accessories popular with teen girls, such as cell phone cases, featured rhinestones and other “bling.” Butterflies also appear to be a popular motif with that age group.

“I wanted it to be something where they could see themselves reflected in it,” Joanne said. In this case, literally as well as figuratively.

CARINGBRIDGE® is a registered trademark of CaringBridge.

Featured artistJoanne eschrichAUGUST 2014

“All together, this collection reflects both the familiar and known concept of angels from my upbringing, plus my exposure to this other way of looking at the same icons. It’s the same faith and the same muse, but as seen through the eyes of different cultures using their own medium.”

“My family comes from the Portuguese Islands. My mom is always asking when we’re going to do a Portuguese angel. I tell her, that’s a skin tone of its own, Mom. Maybe I’ll get to that.”

“I love the feedback I get when people say I’m so glad you did an angel for us.”

angel of Prayer and angel of enlightenment - 2014“For the past five years I’ve been doing an unofficial series of African-American angels. These are also very interesting to me because (like the Hispanic angels) there’s a rich culture there to dive into—looking at skin tone and using models (friends of mine here at Hallmark), making a connection with their culture and, once again, seeing how the faith we share is reflected in yet another culture, another perspective.”

Feliz navidad - 2014“When we were in Santa Fe, everywhere we went these Hispanic angels were a big thing. The colors were bright and different from the way we usually do angels. I wanted to address that and truly capture the flavor of it. Angels are so often whitewashed and we wanted to get the colors of the skin and the hair just right. I wanted this one to look like it was made out of terra cotta like the clay and figurines we saw there.”

christmas angel - 2014“This is kind of the flipside of the Hispanic angel. I wanted to give it that traditional cherub kind of look—joyful, with the larger wings and a flow about her with the charms of a cross and a heart that’s dangling from her waist. I wanted to keep her colors light. I had a lot of fun with her. She kind of reflects my Catholic upbringing. Like the angels I’d see in the churches growing up.”

A Keepsake Flight of Angels

Featured artistJoanne eschrichAUGUST 2014

el Divino niño Jesús - 2014“We had the opportunity to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a huge art fair. While there, I saw a small, charming piece depicting The Holy Family with baby Jesus inside a paper star. The colors were similar to a lot of other pieces I saw throughout the Santa Fe area. I actually made the original ornament out of terra cotta clay, but it was too fragile to mold from. So, I created the original for this in wax.”