Our featured speakers for 2017 are…

Save the date: Midwest Craft Con is coming back to Columbus, Ohio, Feb. 10-12, 2017! And our featured speakers are coming from near and far to share their experiences running creative businesses:

Our featured speakers for 2017 are Yao Cheng of Columbus, Chris Glass of Cincinnati and Jen Hewett of San Francisco — one for each day of Midwest Craft Con!

Yao Cheng

Yao is a watercolor artist and designer based in Columbus, Ohio. Yao’s watercolor work concentrates on capturing the immediacy of expressions through color, shapes and brush strokes, with an emphasis on imperfect marks and unpredictable colors. Located in downtown Columbus, Yao Cheng Design is an online retail shop and design studio where Yao’s modern and bright watercolors come to life on products and clientele work. The retail side focuses on a range of products for the home, such as art prints, textiles and paper goods, while the design studio focuses on creating specialty wedding stationery and larger client projects.

Yao’s work can be found at West Elm, One Kings Lane, Houzz, her online shop and Etsy. She has an online tutorial series with Creativebug and has been featured in Southern Living, HGTV Magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Style Me Pretty and Design Love Fest.

Chris Glass

Chris Glass is a designer from Cincinnati, Ohio, working on things like identities, websites, applications and T-shirts. You might know him from the Oxford-based Wire and Twine, a design firm that happens to own screen-printing equipment.

He is currently embarking on a year-long civic sabbatical with People’s Liberty, an unconventional grant-making organization, to explore photography as a way to encourage being a tourist in your own city in a project called PhotoCorps. He shares a sunny loft apartment in an old factory with his sassy cat, Edie. In his spare time, he devises schemes to create spare time.

Jen Hewett

Jen Hewett is a printmaker, surface designer, textile artist and teacher. A lifelong Californian, Jen combines her love of loud prints and saturated colors with the textures and light of the landscapes she grew up with to create printed textiles that are both highly tactile and visually layered.

Her hand-printed textile collages have been exhibited at Rare Device in San Francisco, and Artstream Gallery in New Hampshire, and her work has been featured in Anthology Magazine, Uppercase, Taproot, Design*Sponge and a number of books. When she’s not creating in her tiny (54 square feet!) San Francisco studio or teaching her popular block printing on fabric classes, she can be found cycling around San Francisco on her pink bike, chatting with her neighbors at the local wine bar, walking her tiny rescue dog Gus, gossiping with her friends, redecorating her apartment or noodling on her couch.

Got something to say?

If you’ve got an idea for a talk you’d like to give, fill out this form! We’ll be announcing the rest of the 2017 schedule later in the fall, and you can see the past con’s schedule here.

Tickets for Midwest Craft Con 2017 will go on sale Friday, July 1! The first 100 tickets are $199 each, and after that, the full price is $249. Get your early bird ticket while you can — when the early bird tickets sell out, they’re gone.