My name is Giovana Marcon, I am 35 years old, I am Brazilian and I have lived in the United States for almost 2 years. I've always been in love with handcrafts. I loved to cut paper, paste, sew, draw, paint. I learned a lot from my mother, who is an art teacher, and with my grandmother who was a dressmaker. My relationship with embroidery came as a child when I learned my first embroidery stitches with my mother. I remember skirting ducklings in a pond in a dishcloth. If I'm not mistaken, my mother still has this with her.

I took a technical course in industrial design, where I could use my ability to draw and create. Later, I majored in Museology and specialized in Social Memory and Cultural Heritage. I was working in a museum in my city when in 2016 I thought about doing something to increase my income. I remembered the embroidery that my mother taught me to do and then I started the À mão, which in English means handmade.

My embroidered designs have always been with a more modern footprint, not at all like the designs my mother taught me, but I still had not added the LEDs. The first embroidery I made with LEDs was made to give of wedding gift. My husband works with electronics, technology, and stuffs like that, and together we came up with the idea of making a special gift that would bring my skills and his abilities as well. We loved the result. When we moved to the United States, here I continued working on my project À mão and thought about creating a series of embroideries with these little lights, since I had liked the result so much. He taught me the whole electronic part and so was born the embroidery collection with LEDs, where I use fabric, embroidery floss, LED lights, resistors, switches and a few more components to create starry skies, UFOs, ETs, Zodiac constellations, planets and all those cosmic elements that are my inspiration.

More info: Instagram