About Me

How to condense 63 years…
I was asked the when, why fiber and how of my journey into an artful life…

When? In 5th grade at the ripe age of ten, it was confirmed by Mrs. Thompson that I could draw. “After all, your mother can, so you can too.” The subject was to draw clouds…beyond the human form, probably the hardest things to draw. Of course, at age ten, I was very skeptical of any talent. Mom could draw, she was the greatest copier ever of my favorite cartoon characters.

Why fiber? It was everywhere I looked growing up. The entire family was called upon to stitch chair covers for the six dining room chairs my grandmother acquired. This included my grandfather and my uncle. No one was safe. If you stood still too long, Gram would have you recovered in needlepoint. It was all pre-worked centers on Penelope with black or burgundy backgrounds but that was needlepoint.

My grandfather, Mom’s dad, was a gunsmith and my first art teacher. We’d be sitting at the kitchen table while he had his coffee and he’d give me little exercises that were typically a doodle made more fun. Lines would become my favorite.

All the females could sew, embroider or knit. I was enrolled in 4H where I scoffed at the way the instructor thought a zipper should be sewn into an a-line skirt. I learned quickly that there was always more than one way to do anything and was retaught in college how to do the entire application by hand as a couture….sans machine.

In high school, I was a business student, hence my ability to type super fast. One day, a fellow students older sister came to speak to us about her career in art. Now I wonder why she came to our typing class but that she did and I’ve been forever grateful. She had graduated from the Art Institute as a fashion illustrator and was working for a pattern company in NY illustrating children’s fashions for the covers of sewing patterns. I was in awe…I knew I could do this and was in my counselors office the next day to switch to as many art classes as allowed. No more typing and shorthand and dreaded book keeping. Yes, this is necessary and should still be taught regardless.

I applied to the same school and was accepted into the Fashion Illustration department. I soon discovered I liked graphic design and preferred a minimalist approach. Not always well accepted by the teaching staff but nevertheless, my grades were quite good. I can still see Mrs. Hall raising her eyebrows as she wrote A+ on an unfinished painting….to this day it remains that way with her handwritten grade on the back.

The why mixes with how and continues to form….the school was for commercial art and I fully expected to waltz across the street to a well-known downtown department store and have a job. After all I had my foot in the door as a classmate and I had created a window display as a school project. I was that confident. Then I graduated. Enter the real world, I opened the newspaper to find every fashion ad to be a photograph, not one illustrated fashion to be seen.

I managed to find freelance work with small boutiques, they could afford my art more than a photographer. I worked for a t-shirt factory running their stat camera, creating transparencies for the three to four-color printing. Not very exciting but it paid my bills. I had a short stint with an ad agency designing logos and running their camera as well.

Then one day I walked into a yarn shop. Complete about-face. That was a Friday and over the weekend I re-taught myself to knit, starting that Monday with Kittens Knit Shop in downtown Pittsburgh. They’d been there for over thirty years and were full service. I learned everything about a knitted garment and how to design one…imagine this…it’s all math.

So began my adventure. I was newly married and on my way. Several moves and the birth of my daughter found me a bit scattered as my focus was not on becoming a famous fashion illustrator or artist. Although, I always had some kind of fiber project going. My daughter had an amazing wardrobe of knitted garments and often something I’d sewn to go with. I worked for another yarn shop when she was in pre-school and kindergarten, then another move and the birth of my son. While I was seven months pregnant I tried my hand at making tassels, I showed the shop owner, Randi at The World in Stitches and she easily talked me into teaching them. I had found needlepoint at this time as well, and loved the ability to draw and stitch. I could create the most amazing geometric shapes and the hand-painted thread made the shapes even more fascinating. I’d worked string art with copper wire around nails I’d hammered into wood in high school…now here I was doing it with thread. Forget those blasted spirograph toys that always bounced out of the teeth just when you’d get a really cool design going.

Soon after this, I met a designer from Victoria BC that was out there self-publishing, Catherine Brittain. She convinced me to find a distributor and my journey took on a new energy. Mind you, this was before computers, we hand-wrote actual letters back and forth, which I still have neatly stashed in my studio. She introduced me to Ruth Schmuff. Ruth was with Sharon’s Designer Collection. I went to a Nashville Needlework Market with the local shop girls….driven by one of the husbands through an ice storm!! There I met Sharon, she took my meager three designs and sold some right then and there. The following week she took them to the West coast market where David McCaskill bought them for his shop Club Stitch in San Francisco. I was on cloud nine. Since that time, many many changes have occurred throughout the industry and my life. I had begun with charted needle point designs that became almost obsolete as painted canvases became the rage. Then knitting became the favorite among the masses and needlepoint took a back seat. Presently, we seem to be popular all at the same time, lots of needlepoint and knitting. Don’t let anyone tell you that we are a dying art!

My journey has taken me full circle a few times. I had a gallery show with my classmate from high school art, who now owns her own studio gallery and has had a piece at the Salmagundi Art Club in NY. Ruth Schmuff, my long-time friend, is now my distributor and works her fingers to the bone. We all somehow manage to keep each other grounded.

The goal for me is to have what I do accept as the fine art it truly is. What I, and many like me do is not ‘just stitching’. I now paint my canvases, usually from a piece of line art I’ve drawn, most often I have a direction I plan to take but just as often it takes on it’s own. After painting I gather a pile of threads that are typically all different in make up; wool, silk, metallic, and real metal. I always have a pile of glass beads, buttons, and sparkly rocks too! If I can figure out a way to attach it to the surface of my canvas without glue, it goes into the project basket. My pieces have been shown in galleries. I participate in fine art shows. I very much enjoy teaching. Meeting new stitchers along with seeing those I’ve known ‘forever’ but don’t get to see too often allow me to spread the love and vision of my art which continues to evolve. Like the Tai Chi I ‘practice’ almost daily, my art is a journey which is taking me on a path finding new discoveries around every corner. At a recent show I heard myself telling a visitor to my booth….”what I do is like needlepoint on steroids, it’s not my grandmothers’ needlepoint”.