One of the great things about the EPCOT Food and Wine Festival is that while you are enjoying strolling around the world showcase enjoying the great food, wine, and beers not only do you get to see the great sites of the countries around the World Showcase you also get the chance to see the works of some very talented venders. My wife and I have been going to the Food and Wine Fest since 2003 and we’ve enjoyed getting to see the works of and meet some very talented artists.
In 2003 Our very first time at the Food and Wine Fest we met and fell in love with the work of Heather French. Heather is a very talented artist who that year was selected to do the promotional poster for the EPCOT Food and Wine Festival. We met her late one evening towards the rear of the World Showcase. We just fell in love with the great painting she’d done for the festival and bought a print, it has hung in our dining room ever since. We had such a great time talking to Heather, my wife Tracy is an artist too so they had a lot in common.
Each year that we go to the Food and Wine Fest we look forward to seeing what Heather has on display. This year was no exception, we had a nice chat with Heather and walked away with a cool print of a black cat looking at a martini with an olive floating in it.
This year we met another great Heather. Her name is Heather Swanepoel and she has a booth set up for her Rinse Bath and Body Co. in the Festival Welcome Center in the former Wonders of Life Pavilion. We always head to the Festival Welcome Center first each year. We love to see what new merchandise and artwork is available. Well while we were looking around we found Heather’s booth and we just loved her products. Heather makes handmade soaps and body products, she had so many great smelling items. We bought quite a few bars of soap including the merlot soap which was one of the wine soaps she’d made for the festival. We’ve been using her soaps since we got home and absolutely love them, they’re all natural and smell great.
We were chatting with Heather Swanepoel about the great opertunities for artists at the Food and Wine Festival and mentioned that we’d just seen Heather French, who we’d known for years and Heather said that to only reason that she was able to be at the Food and Wine Festival this year was because of Heather French. They’d met and one artist helped another, so cool.
This year we went at the start of the Food and Wine Fest but we usually go the last weekend that it’s running in November so that we can also go the Disney’s Festival of the Masters. The Festival of the Masters is a great art show held at Downtown Disney around the Veterans Day weekend each year. Artists from all over come to display and sell their work. It is awesome!
I hope Disney keeps up the tradition of bringing inspiring art work to EPCOT and Downtown Disney, the artwork at the Food and Wine Festival was dwindled over the years. It’s one of the reasons we love to come to WDW at that time of year.
Heather Swanepoel’s Rinse Bath and Body Co. Site
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