We were lucky to catch up with Karina Zedalis recently and have shared our conversation below.
Karina, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
It made perfect sense to me that bouquet of flowers surrounded by hemp filler-foliage could captive a marketplace already hooked on new and novel, thus making this cultivar a meaningful project from a business perspective.
During my first year flower farming I began learning the mechanics of European-style floral arrangement, and included the classic zigzag emerald-green hemp leaves to compliment such flowers as garden roses, calendula, sunflowers, and ranunculus.
Now with proof-of-concept experience in the field, I am excited to share an introductory digital course on utilizing hemp in flower farming and floral design work. By encouraging fellow creatives to join me in hemp material use across diverse industries we can use art and design to stimulate the fledgling hemp economy.
More importantly, the average flower-buying consumer can now see a hemp leaves in the flesh, instead of just another packaged CBD-extraction product. Women especially are weaving together a mythic reclamation of the natural world, that is the Beauty-Truth-Goodness.
Simply stated: the #CreateHempDemand conversation happens more readily when beautiful flowers are in the mix and hemp is a team player on the farm!
Karina, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Long before hemp materials entered my life, there was a little independent fabric store in our small town that my mother liked to frequent when my sister and I were kids. Occasionally my mom did the trek to ‘Cloth World’, a much bigger store further way, with a full selection of bridal and specialty fabrics.
I think this is where I first really fell in love with textiles. Wandering around rows of draped fabric bolts that towered above my little child body was heaven! Touching all the textures (especially the feather boas!), seeing clothing patterns to sew and colors galore, made my little mind light-up with playful possibilities and happiness!
It was the early 1970’s, my mom was into sewing, macrame, and making area-rugs from carpet remnants (an early adopter of up-cycling!). She kept a large and ever-expanding collection of tropical plants in a room we simply called ‘the Florida room’.
My dad always had a home or garden improvement project going-on. I had similar feelings about the potential of lumber like fabric to create things. I enjoyed tagging along with my dad to the home improvement stores, almost as much as the fabric stores.
With parents actively creating things to improve the design, function, or beauty of our home space over the years, I became accustom to seeing ‘possibility’ in materials to create new forms and the role of nature to inspire and nourish us.
Now on the cusp of my 58th time around the sun, my current mission is creating images of the superpower hemp plant interspersed into everyday life so that we can foster faster adoption and innovation.
The Mexican sunflower is my favorite flower, but the plant I am most dedicated to is cannabis sativa.
In a passing sentence from my 1986 college textile textbook, hemp first came into my life and I missed it. Basically, the sentence was about vegetable fibers, and that hemp, jute, and kapok were once used in textiles, but fell out of favor once synthetic textiles came on the scene.
It did not occur to me at the time to investigate what a ‘hemp plant’ was. Growing up on Florida’s west coast near Clearwater, I knew what a kapok tree was and had used jute string in macrame before, but had no idea about hemp,
It would be years later in 1995 in Amsterdam before I would encounter the hemp plant on display, complete with a full historical and industrial explanation of what this plant is all about. Upon returning home to the states, I began my love affair with this plant and searched out as many products as were available back in the mid to late 90’s.
It would take another 19 years and moving to Colorado, before I could GROW HEMP in the ground. In 2014, my partner and I created HempStarter Research, hemp in Boulder County, one of 150 participants for the first time in our state’s history. Prior to that, I had only collected many of the prominent books on hemp and seen it in photos.
Over the years I have bought hemp paper and fabric to experiment with constructing artistic dolls and stretched canvas for painting. I love taking a flat piece of material and sewing it into a 3 dimensional soft-sculpture ‘doll’, or garment.
In April 2020, I resigned from a successful and satisfying role with a ecologically focused landscape company in Boulder, Colorado to start my own hemp-focused art business. After years of painting casually, I was eager to create artwork with hemp materials and tell my stories to encourage others to ‘discover’ hemp too.
Everything I ever did in my assorted career ‘incarnations’ over the years has definitely prepared me for going down the entrepreneurial e-commerce pathway. That also includes being able to do in-person art sales locally, market my business, being at-ease shooting selfie videos for social, and public speaking. Doing many years of yoga, motherhood, living through natural disasters, and meditation also helped me in training for the unknowns of opening my own enterprise!
In 2022 I produced the first-ever, limited edition hemp materials + art, vertical desk 2023 calendar. Printed on hemp and recycled paper card stock, each month featured my paintings or photos, with hemp-nugget wisdom stories on the backside. The paper nests into a hemp wood timber stand and is meant to inspire people to try out hemp supplies and materials across many areas of their lives. I released a 2024 hemp art calendar with more art and tips about incorporating hemp for health and gardens.
Encouraging visual creatives, floral designers, farmers, artists, marketers, and entrepreneurs to use more hemp materials in their work, designs, and routine practices is a low hanging ‘hemp fruit’ we all can incorporate in a multitude of practical ways! I love this multi-dimensional aspect about creating my hemp business: I grow the plants that is my art that is the message and the messenger at the same time!
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
The mad-rush to grow a high-producing CBD strain of hemp for mental wellness was all that people were talking about back in 2014, during the early years of the Colorado hemp experiment.
Using hemp seed to grow micro-greens, landscape mulch, animal feed + bedding, or even cover crops, would have to wait for a few years until domestic seed banks filled, and seed costs lowered becoming available for commercial sale.
When my friend sent me a link on Instagram about a wildly successful couple growing micro-greens down in Louisiana, a light bulb turned on in my brain. By January 2023, I had built a personal hemp seed bank from three seasons of growing the plant in Boulder, Colorado. My hemp art business was now 3 years old, and I had plenty of hemp seed to experiment with growing micro-greens. Why not grow greens and make art at the same time?
Starting with small batches, I was able to dial in the optimal growing protocols for these delightful looking sprouts grown in soil. Naturally I had to take photos of my little plant models. Soon new paintings of hemp micro greens followed!
Next I learned everything I could about the business side of going to market with a farm product. Some of it over-lapped with best practices for marketing artwork. Podcasts are your best friend with so many solid real-world, hard-won learning experiences from people doing the work of marketing their business. They were definitely instrumental in making the pivot from having a job to being self-employed, and continue to be an important resource in my entrepreneurial journey.
From there I reached out to an independent grocer promoting food in reusable glass packaging, and began providing them a variety of micro-greens weekly. At this point I had begun flower farming at a 12 acre property not far from their store. When their compost hauler changed their pick-up list, the farm manager and I arranged a new compost hauling contract for this store’s food waste and over-ripe produce.
With a dozen chickens on the farm and now a weekly supply of fresh compost ingredients, 500 red wiggler worms were brought-in to keep the composting happening. This ‘black gold’ was later spread on the emerging heirloom flowers and hemp plants, that thrived-on the nutrient-rich worm ‘castings’.
Hooray a local food-waste loop was closed! By growing hemp as food and then making those images into art, both the message and the messenger help us all to gain more clarity about the benefits of this fast-growing resource. Being able to make small pivots along the way without losing the bigger vision of creating more hemp demand, keeps my creative work full of momentum!
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
It is a thrilling time to be a hemp material artist, ushering in a new era of plant resource and abundance. Talking about the cannabis sativa plant can start with a painted image of a hemp field with zinnias and sunflowers. Next you find out the painting was done on 100% hemp canvas and the handsome frame was constructed from hemp stalk timbers and polished with beeswax and hemp sealant.
I grew the plants I painted from seed, that I originally grew back in 2014 when it first became legal to do so in Colorado. My history getting to know hemp began in college in the late 1980’s. This long creative relationship using hemp materials to make art is finally going public after many stops and starts across decades. I think of it as a mature garden and artful life, with a plant mascot and mission.
I love sharing these hemp stories and artwork in-person as a way to inspire others to take up hemp-commerce in innovative ways. These conversations are super rewarding and the confluence of my favorite creative endeavors: making art and growing things.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://karinazedalis.bigcartel.com/
- Instagram: @karinazedalis
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karina-zedalis
- Youtube: @karinazedalis_hemp_art
Image Credits
Karina Zedalis