Last weekend three Kirkland residents and former Kirkland Patch employees came together to showcase their creativity in wine making, publishing and painting – and celebrate their successes since parting from the national media company.

Former Kirkland Patch editor and Seattle Post-Intelligencer outdoors reporter Greg Johnston and Patch columnists Julie Arnan and Jennifer Armstrong held a joint event Saturday at the Armstrong Family Winery in Woodinville. There, attendants got a chance to sample wine made by Tim Armstrong, Jennifer Armstrong’s husband, while listening to Johnston discuss his new book, “Washington’s Pacific Coast: A Guide to Hiking, Camping, Fishing & Other Adventures,” and view a series of  Arnan’s social-media inspired paintings.

“It’s fun to be able to showcase and celebrate with people from your past who have known about the hard work you put in to make these things happen,” Armstrong said.

The event also showcased their passions and accomplishments. All three had already discovered their respective passions and interests when they first starting working for Kirkland Patch, a community news website, in 2010. Johnston, who had worked for the Seattle PI for 25 years, developed a fascination with the Washington coastline, where he had spent many family summer vacations.

“That began my love affair with the coast of Washington,” he said. “It was just a magical place for me as a kid.”

During his time reporting, he discovered that while there were books on specific aspects of the coast, there was no comprehensive guide.

“People used to call me occasionally and ask me ‘What’s a good book on the coast of Washington?’” he said. “I said, ‘there isn’t any.’”

When the Seattle PI closed its print publication and laid off most of its staff in 2009, Johnston began conducting research, writing the initial chapters for the book.

“I was suddenly left unemployed and nothing to do,” he said. “So I did what I do best, which was write… The research wasn’t too intense because I had this long history with the coast. A friend I was talking to recently, he asked what was the big surprise was (while researching). I said there wasn’t anything, because I knew the coast so well.”

One thing he didn’t want to do, however, was write a standard guidebook. He wanted a book that would cover the natural and cultural history of the coast and would allow the reader to have greater appreciation for it.

“It wasn’t just that I wanted to write a book. I wanted to write about what I love intelligently, in a way readers know how to treat and respect this place,” he said. “My real goal is to educate people about what a treasure our coast is, so they can approach it from an intelligent perspective, a perspective of respect. Ultimately, I want people and readers to protect and nurture that coast… You can’t fully comprehend an area unless you know its cultural history. If you do have a sense of its natural and cultural history, it enriches the whole experience… I tell people exactly what kind of history they’re going to experience on a hike.”

He put the book on hold for the editor position with Kirkland Patch. With a strong emphasis on breaking news coverage that required near-continuous monitoring, he had to focus on his editor role. The book sat dormant for two and a half years.

“I was working 55-65 hours a week,” he said. “When you work that much you don’t have the opportunity to do anything else. You don’t want to write, you just want to kick back and relax or hike… I was just dead tired at the end of the day and didn’t have it in me to keep writing the book.”

Initially given a generous freelance budget to hire additional writers, Johnston brought on Jennifer Armstrong and Julie Arnan, both of whom had writing backgrounds. A public relations specialist, Jennifer Armstrong had moved to Kirkland with her husband and two infants, having already acquired an interest in wine-making. While working on her consulting business, she wrote weekly parenting columns for Kirkland Patch.

Arnan, who penned the weekly food and dining columns, was also writing a cooking blog for about several years after she had developed an interest in the health and nutritional aspect of food.

“It was funny, because there were lots of mess ups that I wrote about,” she said of the blog. “I really enjoyed that process and writing.”

Arnan covered the Kirkland eatery scene and the newest restaurants.

“It was a lot of experience,” she said. “And I got to know everybody in Kirkland, which from the food standpoint, it’s a small town.”

An adjunct faculty member teaching art at Northeast University, Arnan also had an equal interest in painting but, like Johnston, had put it aside to focus on other endeavors.

As Armstrong wrote for Patch, her family pursued its dream of opening a winery by celebrating their first commercial vintage in 2011.

“We realized it was a good fit for our interest and skills and we wanted to start a family business,” she said.

Arnan and Armstrong’s writing for Patch came to an end when the site’s freelance budget got slashed, according to Johnston.

Johnston finally left Patch in May 2013 when he felt that the news site had veered off from its original purpose.

“When they veered off of that mission, I knew I needed to get back to my book,” he said.

Moving on to write for 425 Magazine, Arnan said her work required extensive use of social media, which helped inspire her, as she sought to get back into painting.

“Oil painting is really what I love to do,” she said. “So when I was trying to build up a new body of work… I was thinking about what I wanted to paint. I had a done (painted) a lot of people and wanted to try something new. I thought I should try to merge all of my worlds together.”

The idea was to paint Instagram photos that chefs had posted of their meals online.

“It’s interesting to take something that’s fleeting, a meal and an Instagram photo, and make it more permanent,” she said. “Not only are meals fleeting, you eat them, somebody takes a lot of time to put the presentation together and then you consume it, but everybody takes pictures of their meal and posts it to their Instagram site and Twitter, and it briefly lives on in the social media-sphere and everybody forgets about it.”

One of the problems she found, however, was that not many chefs used Instagram to showcase their gastronomical talent, and among those that did were not nearly as talented photographers.

“I gravitated towards warmer colors and things that have a lot of circles,” she said. “Circles and squares go really well together.”

Meanwhile, the Armstrongs continued with their winery, opening a tasting room in Woodinville in 2013. Recently, their wines have met critical acclaim from the Seattle Wine Awards, winning two double gold and one gold. Although they don’t have their own vineyard yet, contracting with vineyards in Eastern Washington to buy the grapes for their wine, she said adding one to the family winery is one of their long-term goals.

“It’s been a great fun family adventure,” Armstrong said.

As part of their tasting room, the Armstrongs feature different local artists as a way of recognizing their work and giving them exposure to the community. Having previously featured other work by Arnan, her most recent paintings based on Instagram food photos were done specifically for the tasting room.

“It’s nice for our guests to be able to not only enjoy tasting our wines but also some time to enjoy a treat for all the senses,” Armstrong said. “It’s (Arnan’s work) beautiful, totally appropriate because she is a food writer and photographer and painter. It’s a beautiful way to express something she is so passionate about.”

As for Johnston, having completed the book and shopped around for a publisher, he was able to land a deal with Mountaineers Books. After another year of revisions and rewriting, the book was finally published in May. While he had other book signings scheduled, the Saturday event gave him the opportunity to discuss the coast in-depth with a slideshow presentation.

“It’s awesome to see their success and their dream come true,” Arnan said. “That’s a hardworking dream. With Greg, he’s the same age as my dad, and so he really mentored me from a professional standpoint, but it was really cool to see progress in wanting to write this book for so long and then finally finishing it.”

“The cool thing is we’ve gone different paths, but they are all three creative paths,” Johnston said. “We’re still pursuing our separate creative endeavors. It was really cool to once again join as a team. Different creative endeavors than at Patch, so it was just a lot of fun and combine our various respective pursuits.”

To learn more about the Armstrong Family Winery, go to armstrongwinery.com.

To buy Johnston’s book, go to mountaineersbooks.org/Washingtons-Pacific-Coast-P1597.aspx.