Before the summer of 2004, Karen June Grant was just one of those gifted crafters we all get to meet from time to time. "Just"? No, that's not the right way to put it: The woman has panache.

But that summer Karen began to evaluate her main source of employment, graphic and Web design. Like many of us, she took what I've come to call a "momventory" because she and her husband were going to adopt from Russia. "As we started to get closer to referral," she told me, "I realized that I was not going to have a lot of time doing that kind of business. Most of my clients were in Boston, I wasn't going to be able to take time to go meet with them."

She decided to see if she could turn her knack for crafts into a full-blown business. And little by little, that business began to be colored by the adoption.

"I had been trying to think of something to take the caretakers," she says, "but we had limited funds. And I wanted to take them that said something about me." Like the snappy clutch she made for herself that caught the eye of people everywhere she went.

And so was born the Nataliya Bag, named after her son's favorite caretaker at his orphanage in Moscow. (She wound up making 17 to take to Russia.) And Simply June, her Web-based store for selling the bag and many, many other things, like onesies bedecked with Russian nesting dolls and hand-embroidered buttons that echo Russian folk designs.

Karen launched her business the week before Thanksgiving of 2005 and, as any one of us who has been through Russia's chaotic process recently could have predicted, she got her referral the day before Thanksgiving. She and her husband--who had just started a new job--made their first trip just before Christmas; their second trip and court date came in March. Their son will be three in July.

Karen continues to give back to the adoption community. She recently offered many of her wares at a fundraiser put on by her adoption agency, Alliance for Children

"I'm at my happiest when I am creative," she says simply. If so, her son is destined to grow up in a household full of joyful inspiration.