Goes from cross stitching designs and kits nationally to greeting cards and painting in Columbia

By Mary Ellen Graybill

Diana Thomas, teacher, artist, and entrepreneur has a spiritual connection to Columbia. She resides in a beautiful Church of God parsonage located at 39 North 7th Street with her husband, Reverend Fred Thomas.

Diana Thomas is the Artsy Girl. Photograph by Mary Ellen Graybill.

How she came to raise her blended family of six children and also live a creative artist’s life is a special story.  Diana is a renowned illustrator and designer of “counted cross stitch patterns” for such companies as Janlynn Corporation in Massachusetts. She has been published in craft magazines and Better Homes and Gardens.

“I did designing as a part time job, so I could be a stay-at-home mom … it’s been a pretty lucrative business,” she said.

Sometimes she charges a flat fee, and sometimes she takes royalties for a design she sells to companies like Janlynn. The Thomas family has been living in Columbia for the past 7 years. Her successful cross stitching design work has been her main business out of home for about 15 – 17 years, she said.

When the couple moved to Columbia, said Diana, they wanted to be part of the community.

Box of Craft Materials at the Market House

She found that the Columbia Market House offered a reasonably priced stand for rent where she could sell something. She started with selling popcorn, then local Manheim honey, and then one day, she took a box of craft materials to the market. 

“…I started making greeting cards, which I had done up until then, but not that actually sold,” she said.

The cards sold well, and so, she was encouraged to continue making cards. When The Daily Grind opened, she put her cards for sale there where they can be found today.

Around the corner from her house on North 7th Street, at  Columbia’s Fourth Fridays’ popular Jonal Gallery (653 Locust Street,) she got further encouragement from artist Dale Welbley.

“Why don’t you do something with your art?” said Dale.

After an outdoor show of some of her framed cross stitched pieces in Columbia, Jonal Gallery accepted her work.

“But that’s sort of the tail end of my art journey,” she said. “Now, I also have a booth in my sister city, Lancaster.

“Building Character” at 342 North Queen Street, Lancaster was an architectural salvage center until Thomas helped start up the art studio and shops for her “Artsy Girl” business.

It’s now opened every third Friday 7-9 PM for “Ladies Night Out” with live music and shopping, free desserts and door prizes.

The Rest of the Story

How she got started as an artist was a little bit of luck, a lot of personality, and talent for illustration.

Back in Ohio, where she grew up, her father was an art director and her mother a weaver and seamstress who raised her and 5 siblings, including a set of twins.  Her heritage is a blend of Scotch-Irish, English, Dutch, and French, she said. And her parents always encouraged her to be an artist if that was her choice.

Diana attended the Art Institute of Pittsburg for fashion illustration. Upon returning to the work world after taking time out to start her family, she found that there were no jobs available in illustration of fashions, housewares to fur coats. She tried graphic arts.

“It wasn’t for me,” she said. “It (was) like wearing a shoe that doesn’t fit quite right…it was too mechanical.”

Then she met Fred and they married, each having children, and time was scarce to do art.

“…except that in the 80’s, cross stitching was very popular. I designed cross stitch because I didn’t like to read the charts, so I would design my own…and then, I would chart it after the fact, and one day I said to myself, ‘Well, this is backwards! How many people make charts?’ “

So, she started to make one-of-a-kind original designs that she paid a friend to stitch. Friends and neighbors called on her services to make patterns of their house, dog, or even their car. She could freehand draw onto graph paper, and then would choose colors of floss, from a floss card.

When she wasn’t designing, she was putting little dots on the graph paper for the stitchers.

She saw an ad in the newspaper for an artist at the largest manufacturer in the world in Reading (“Dimensions”- now located in Atlanta, Georgia, she said) “Honey, isn’t this what you do?” said her husband Fred.

It was.

Practically Hired on the Spot

So, she collected some charts from friends and took the stitched pieces to the interview, and the company “practically hired her on the spot,” she said.

“Then I thought I had died and gone to heaven!” she said happily after learning she would earn a “fantastic wage”, and, since it was pre-computer age, she was drawing the symbols by hand, coloring each block, very meticulously with colored pencil.

It took about three and one-half years before she realized she wanted to do more. The company wouldn’t or couldn’t expand her job, so she left, but took no trade secrets, such as designs that others might want to replicate, she said.

“If I did that I wouldn’t have any integrity in the business, and it would all come back to haunt me…so I went out and right away. I got many other companies, the first of which was in Hazleton … and would drive up there to deliver the designs,” she said.

…”it was a beautiful drive,” she said.

She had learned how to deal with big companies.

Bringing Art into Church is a New Movement Now

These days, Thomas does fine art originals, prints and greeting cards- personalized for any occasion from her “Diana Thomas Studio” located at her home, the parsonage to the Church of God next door, 39 North 7th Street, Columbia. Her phone is: 717 684-3165.

On Saturday, April 23, 2011, there will be a Columbia Church of God “sacrificial Breakfast” 10 – 11AM which will be a “reflective worship service” to include a performance by a re-enactor representing Mary, Mother of Jesus. Reservations are requested by calling Diana Thomas at 717 684-3165. Hot cross buns and juice will be served.