About The Artist...

I’ve been working with needles since I was old enough to hold one and I’ve been selling my embroidered pins and wall work for the past ten years.

A writer by training, I began my life as a fiber artist when I answered a want ad for a studio assistant to a rug maker. What began as a day job to support my writing quickly became the thing that made me jump out of bed in the morning. I loved everything about the studio—the smell of the wool, the wall of yarn in every color and texture imaginable. Seeing rugs I helped to make hanging in museums and featured in magazines like Metropolitan Home and Elle Décor was a nice perk too.

A move halfway across the country found me back at an office job and missing the creative energy of the studio, so I picked up a needle and began embroidering pins to sell at the local farmers market. Basically, I was making rugs on a very much smaller scale—my own “wall” of floss could fit in a doll house bedroom. But the small scale had its advantages. There was a new baby toddling around the house, and it was good to be working on something that I could shove in my pocket as I rushed to keep my son from climbing the bookcases.

Several years and two more kids later, I still love the sound of the floss moving through the silk, the satisfaction of getting just the right color combination to make a piece sing—once again, making art is the thing that makes me jump out of bed in the morning.

In my work I use techniques that are thousands of years old to make jewelry and artwork that is decidedly modern, yet unapologetically pretty. Worked predominantly on silk in silk and cotton threads and finished with glass and silver findings, each piece takes hours of work, and may use dozens of colors. Mostly I draw freehand right on the fabric, though I’m not above using old school tricks like grids and pouncing to get the sketch just right. When the embroidery is finished, I generally stitch it around a stiff backing of felt, and then back it in muslin or silk.

I find myself increasingly interested in the places where domesticity and spirituality intersect, and I love that I get to use such a traditionally domestic medium as needlework to do that.

I’m taken with the cross-religious concept that each of us has within us a measure of the divine spark, and I'm interested in the ways that we embody archetypical images and moments (a madonna and child, for example, or a portrait of a saint) in contemporary settings. I hope that juxtaposition inspires new thought about how we experience the holy in our modern world.