ADRIAN — Tabitha Turnbow owned a successful florist shop in Wyandotte when she and her husband, Adam, were married almost 30 years ago. Then, as children Adam Jr. and Isabella came into the family, she decided she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.

But the award-winning floral designer still put her creative skills to use. 

“I loved making things for our home,” she said. 

One day, she made a wreath out of random book pages and posted a picture of it on her Facebook page. Her friends loved it, someone bought it from her that same day, and thus was born The Paper Wreath Co.

Then, “I had a vision for my angel wings,” Turnbow said. She gathered the materials to make it, her husband created a template for the shape, and “as soon as I got it done I knew I had something very special.”

The company started out in the family’s Wyandotte home about 10 years ago. They moved to Adrian about seven years ago when they decided they wanted to live in a smaller locale.

Turnbow specializes in hand-crafted angel wings, wreaths, and other tributes to deceased loved ones, both people and pets. Pieces are available for both indoor and outdoor use.

Cemetery pieces using fresh evergreen branches, sourced from Urquhart’s Tree Farm in Chelsea, are available each holiday season starting Nov. 1. Angel wings, crosses, and Christmas trees are available, along with headstone arrangements and smaller angel wings that clip onto a crypt’s vase holder.

Other pieces include angel wings, crosses, shadowboxes — which are the company’s most popular product — and wreaths that all incorporate rolled-up hymnal pages with the music for “Amazing Grace” printed on them. One product line specifically honors law enforcement officers.

Ornaments and decorative pillows are available as well.

Pieces can be personalized with the loved one’s name and photo, and Turnbow can create items that speak to what that person was all about, whether that might be a butterfly, a tractor to honor a farmer, or just about anything else.

The majority of her clients are parents who have lost children, and in honoring those children “I’ve done everything from Spider-Man to Pokémon,” she said.

“We do a lot of very personal things for our customers,” and many of them return year after year to order the cemetery pieces. “We’ve never met them, but we know their names and we know their kids’ stories.”

And the work she does is very personal to her as well. “I pray over every piece I make,” she said.

Sales have grown exponentially over The Paper Wreath Co.’s years in business. When it first got off the ground, “there was nothing like it in the world,” she said, and so the interest from customers was definitely there.

Before long, in fact, things had spread far beyond the family basement. “It grew to take up every room of our house,” Turnbow said, adding that she would love to someday have a separate facility to house the operation.

At the beginning the company only served local customers, but as it grew and they needed to start shipping their products elsewhere, the challenge became to keep the items from being damaged in shipping. Turnbow’s husband designed a special box to meet the need.

“Adam’s a super-talented guy. He’s just as creative as I am,” she said.

Today, the company ships its creations all over the country, and “we do thousands of them a year,” she said. “We’ve touched thousands of lives with our products, and each one is created with love.”

Last year, Turnbow made her product line even more widely available: she came up with the idea to have do-it-yourself kits produced for use by gift shop owners and florists and teach them how to make pieces themselves so that they can supply the memorial tributes to their own customers.

Stores in Jackson, Trenton, and Belleville, Mich., and Angela’s Angel Gift Stop in Sylvania, Ohio, became the first authorized retailers.

Ever since The Paper Wreath Co. got its start, Turnbow has seen her business as being a calling, a way to help “turn grief into grace.”

“I didn’t choose this work,” she said. “It chose me.”

The Paper Wreath Co. is online at thepaperwreathcompany.com or on Facebook. To contact Turnbow, call 734-258-3457 or email thepaperwreathcompany@gmail.com.