Erika Ebert was born on a barrier island off the coast of NJ, where she spent most of her childhood summers perpetually searching for the elusive wentletrap. Entirely too windy in the wintertime, her mother moved the family to Philadelphia to live along the Wissahickon Valley. Erika was 9 when her family opened American Pie, a store on the 300 block of South Street, Philadelphia, devoted to selling handmade American crafts. While helping to renovate the hardwood floors, she  found a secret cache of antique, cut-glass gemstones from Austria that encouraged her proclivity to search for treasures that others might not see.  

  

She has lived on the Gulf of Mexico in a canoe for weeks, studied Flamenco dancing in Caracas, Venezuela, woven baskets in the mountains of North Carolina, and made outdoor sculpture installations during a peach festival in Sardegna, Italy.  Erika has lugged more cast iron around the tri-state area than she cares to admit, and has recently spent the last ten years making thousands of gallons of paint by hand.  

 

Erika believes that life is full of more than just coincidence and that the things she is drawn to are all signs she’s on the right path. The end goal is to keep it up, keep her eye sharp, and to some day write and print a tiny children’s book.