Natalia is featured on December`s page of the 2021 Ukrainian Heritage calendar. This is her story:

The project to create the 2021 Ukrainian Heritage Calendar gave me the wings of inspiration, the existence of which I had not known before.  I love antique Ukrainian clothes so much that the process of dressing and creating images for the calendar not only made me happy, but also opened a new Me in me. This project gave me a feeling of incredible joy, satisfaction, and the desire to create striys (set of traditional clothes) that would make people feel as if they traveled in time.  Antique clothes are filled with tremendous amount of love and work.  These clothes are stories of individual people and their happy moments. I wanted every model to feel those stories from the past.  I never thought that a woman like me, with a mathematical and logical mindset, could feel so at ease as in a fairy tale!  Three days of filming from 8 am to midnight are some of the most fruitful and happy days of my creative work. It is a great satisfaction to realize that for every item of clothing in my collection, for which I saved up money, searched for and purchased, and then carefully stored, there was a person from the Ukrainian community who wanted to try it on.  The entire Ukrainian community that took part in this project had the same feelings of love for their own Ukrainian heritage. It is this love for Ukrainian heritage that takes me to another dimension every time, gives me joy and incredible energy, a sense of respect for our ancestors and history. Every item in my collection is very much loved by and special to me.

The project not only became an invaluable experience for me but also an opportunity to meet and make friends with fellow Ukrainians.  It was a big and pleasant surprise when I was invited to model for the calendar. And yes, I could not refuse. It is a great honor for me that my children and I, along with Alyonka (one of the key organizers of this whole project) and her boys, are photographed on the same page of the calendar. Moreover, our children - my daughter and Alyona’s son Sashko, became faces for the cover page of the calendar.  The cover page was the best compliment I could have ever received. Putting on our Poltava clothes, we saw how beautiful our children looked together.  From that moment we started the topic of "courtship" and it was not clear whether it was a joke or not ...?  And if in the future Alyona does become my daughter’s mother-in-law, then I'm all for it!  Our whole photo shoot was held in this spirit, full of laugher, jokes, and happy tears.  What an incredible feeling it was!!! Thank you, Ukrainians of San Antonio, for this experience. I love you!