About Me

About Me

As a child, going on summer vacation, my mother would start out the trip by drawing my older sister and me each a paper doll. We rode miles drawing, coloring and cutting out clothes for our dolls. That was my first exposure to designing and creating any kind of doll.

In the mid-fifties, my grandmother worked at a toy wholesale house and actually pulled Barbie from the trash. Her boss said that no one would buy a doll that had a body of a grown woman and had thrown them away! She convinced him to order twelve. She was an amazing seamstress and was enamoured with the detail of those original Barbie clothes. I believe her love of the doll and influence of her incredible sewing skills are at the root of my dollmaking.

Although I majored in painting at Drake University, I have dabbled in everything from basket weaving to quilting. I had a cottage industry called 'Maiden Harvest" in the 80's where a good friend (Vicki Hudgens) and I made and wholesaled corn husk dolls and flowers to over 200 stores across the country.

In 2004, I attended a workshop taught by Akira Blount and discovered that creating art dolls was exactly what I had been working toward.