Tania creates icons and likes painting on gourds and making dolls out of them. "The first time I saw a gourds was when my husband brought me to Blagoevgrad. There were so many of them, they were all my mother-in-law’s and I instantly said, 'This is going to be a boy, and this is going to be a girl' and my father-in-law laughed and told me, 'Those are gourds, my dear, not dolls.' But I told him that I am going to make them. This is just what popped into my imagination, and that is how I started making dolls out of gourds." Tania was born and raised in Dobrich, Bulgaria. She met her husband on the Internet and moved to the other side of the country to be with him. "I have always liked the mountains. When my husband brought me here, this inspired me even more because in Dobrich, I was painting only icons while here I started with the gourds and the landscapes. Nature here had an influence on me and my work." 8 AUBG Daily | Fall 2019
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