Marcia in 1968

Thank you, Rebecca, for inviting me to be a Featured Artist on your excellent site. Somethymes I feel like I were born to this job; my mother was a couture dressmaker, her mother a quilter & embroiderer, both my ex-mothers-in-law sewed for their families and for clients. So my mother kept me in drop-dead clothes all thru the 60's, my grandmother kept us in quilted coverlets and embroidered linens, and my husbands married a girl just like Mom, LOL!

down on the farm

We lived on Grandpa Wilson's farm, away out in the cotton fields of North Dallas County, which is of course all strip malls and condos now (with a Hancock Fabrics store whose back alley was our long muddy driveway). My mother believes that the cheapest way to keep a kid entertained is to give it Art Supplies, which developed my addiction early—I'm not really a doll person, I'm just an art supply junkie, and since it takes every form of art or craft to make a doll, it's the perfect medium for me!

suited up to make dollies

Culture shock struck early when we moved to the inner city projects on Deep Elm Street in Dallas, so that I could attend first grade, but they did gift me with a private school education, where my teachers always cut me a lot of slack because I was a "good girl", letting me spend all my study halls in the back of the art room. As soon as I got out of high school it was off to Austin to be a hippie cowboy shirt vendor on The Drag. Then I got invited to move to a commune in the Texas Hill Country, 100 year-old farmhouse and barn, too many rows to hoe and not enough willing workers, you know that old story, while rampant 70's inflation took away the value of my $25 cowboy shirts, and the dopers let the Farm go all to nowhere.

There was a wonderful costume rental shop out in the little cowboy town of Bertram, Jo's Jabots, a real anachronism. She saw a Mae West cloth sculpture doll I'd made, and wanted hats like that for Real People. This led to miles of petticoats and the drafting up of all my little doll clothes patterns into full scale fabric mileage. I still have a big Rubbermaid tub full of all those slopers and charts. Humans take up too much room! Anyway, that's how I came to specialize in costumes and adjustable fastenings.

Still, living in pseudo-19th century Texas through the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan years was tough. Nothing I tried to do for legitimate income ever seemed to work----as soon as I'd start some exciting venture like Herbs & Edible Ornamentals or OOAK Dolls, "they" would crash the economy and leave me in the rubble. Then some wise soul invented Renaissance Faires,and my true space/thyme dimension finally caught up with me.

Now, I'm getting a bit old to run around Neverland, living in a tent,so this barn on the Divide is a lovely Eden of fresh air and green forest (though of course it's a lot of hard work to keep it looking like Eden, but that keeps up nice and fit). The World Wide Web brings the whole planet to my funky studio, I love my e-maginary friends and clients!