In 1974 my business was a small one-person operation mostly carried out on a treadle sewing table in a one-room house (no electricity, no plumbing) producing an original and rather simplistic folk art style doll made with porcelain. Since those early days, I have devoted much of my attention to the details and accessories of those dolls, creating a much larger scope of techniques, products and supplies than those just for dollmaking. In 1981, after a dream which changed my business dramatically, I began to put these skills together to produce kits - kits with integrity and quality. This began with a simple kit to make a tiny felt bear which later grew into the Basic Bear Series, a series of kits to make the bears, their clothes, their furniture and accessories. The old sewing table became a memory and the business of kits really caught on. During all this time I have always maintained the design and production of my finished things as well. For many years this consisted of only my porcelain dolls, (click here to see porcelain dolls) but gradually I added in accessories for them as it is actually more fun for me to do these than the dolls themselves. In fact, I have always had trouble seeing myself as a dollmaker and instead see what I do as a combination engineer- craftsperson. And as you might expect, all of the accessory making eventually led to the ultimate gathering of accessories into one project which became a large dollhouse in my best 8" doll scale (in other words, not the regular small dollhouse). I would say that aside from the pressures of earning a living, that the thing that has kept my work within the theme of dolls is my love for Early American antiques and the many wonderful dolls who live in museums and books that have really touched my heart with their warmth and charm that somehow only seems to shine through very rare contemporary dolls made by people who either unconsciously or intentionally are able to do this. With the antique dolls, it is often a basic humble handmade style which combines with the patina of age given by many years of caring hands, that accomplishes this so that I see it as a real challenge to make it happen today without those advantages. Dolls for me do not have to look old to have this dearness, even though I do work with my own distressing techniques on some of my cloth dolls to take advantage of this look - in fact, it is easier to get there with this look if you can properly achieve it, so I do think it is harder to get "heart" into a doll without these tricks. Although I did not know it in the beginning, I think my main body of work in dolls which is my porcelain ones, has been fortunate to have this quality - this appeal to the heart - which I attribute to my having designed them in a vacuum with no research and no prior connection to the doll world other than as a child, and importantly, at a time when dollmaking was still asleep as a craft, so that I was not influenced by anything other than my inner self. Since I view myself as primarily a craftsperson, the making of furniture and other accessories fits right in and I find that the same qualities that appeal to me about old dolls is also true of furniture, quilts and other early accessories and that is that the folk art, humble, simple-materials-simple-techniques part that makes me want to either have it all to admire every day or make it. It is not something I have a choice about.

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