I’ve been feathering my nest for a very long time. My studio nest, that is. Finding a place to work has always been important for me. As a kid, it was just my half of a bed growing up in a two-room house. A bigger house meant a real worktable and a space I didn’t have to share with four sisters and a brother. The size and use of my studio space has changed through the years in the same way my work has evolved.
My first studio in our home of 40 years was in the basement. It was a walkout basement with windows and sunlight. I enjoyed it for many years.
One day sitting on a back patio, I began musing over the bleak rear facade of the house. We had remodeled every other part of the house, maybe it was time to take a closer look here, too.
I did a sketch of how I thought we might improve it. I added a screened-in porch on part of the main floor. Above that, I added an extension to an unused bedroom and then an upper deck to tie everything together. I left the drawing casually sitting on the dining room table. We walk by that table many times a day.
A few weeks later, my husband, an architect, said, “That’s a really good idea.”
My treetop studio was born. The unused bedroom became the cozy side of my studio. The new addition with lots of windows and light is the bright, working side.
The cozy side is inspired by an old-world kind of charm that I love. A hand-painted Hungarian table sits in the middle of the room and a built-in bed is partially hidden behind red drapes. The rest is pure Janet: dolls, dollhouses, stumpwork caskets, miniature stages, and embroidered pictures. I still own so many pieces I have created through the years. Early work was created for publications or manufacturers and, once the piece was photographed or shown at a trade show, it was returned to me. Now these works hang on the wall or are stacked in my closet.
Each piece tells a story. In the process, my studio has become a story, too.
The Village and Otis’ Castle
When visitors first walk in, it can be a bit overwhelming. Once your eyes focus, it is the dollhouse wall that most people are drawn to. It’s hard to miss. The overall 12-foot scene is made up of three main buildings: the Red House, Irene’s House, and the Castle. The Red House is at the far right-hand side of the scene. Built from a kit, it originally belonged to our daughter Jane. She played with it often, rearranging and redecorating all the time. Eventually she outgrew it, moved away from home, and left the dollhouse behind. It sat untouched for many years. I knew she didn’t have room or really want it in her own home.
I decided to redecorate it. You should have seen the look on her face when she found out! We had a good laugh over it, but to this day she loves rearranging the people and furniture in all the dollhouses whenever she visits now.
When I remodeled her dollhouse, I invented a story to go with its new tenants. Claire is a grown-up Little Red Riding Hood, now married to William the Woodcutter. Grandmother has her very own special room upstairs, complete with a built-in bed and painted ceiling. Claire was a village busker, entertaining her neighbors with fable puppet shows. When she and William married, they enlarged her puppet productions into Fables In Gables. Together they created stage settings and new characters and presented shows under the attic gables. The villagers loved it.
Some of the villagers live nearby. Below the Red House is a takeout shop owned by Jack Spratt and his wife. Next to that is the lumber- yard run by the Three Pigs. Straw, wood and bricks are always in stock. If you need a new ball gown, be sure to visit Fairy Godmother’s Dress Shop. Here you can enjoy a cup of tea while you decide what magical creation you want to wear.
The space between the Red House and Irene’s House has many little scenes of animals, tree spirits, the Village Life Press office, and even an outhouse. You never know who might show up.
Irene’s House is the next large structure and it, too, began as a kit. I needed a diversion while awaiting the outcome of our 2020 presidential election and Irene needed a home. Irene was the wife of the Dragon Prince. When she had the nerve to produce a baby daughter instead of a son, and then demand equal rights to rule over the kingdom she inherited, she was booted from her own kingdom. Her daughter was kept by the Dragon Prince. It was not a good situation.
Irene turned to Otis, the Princely Dragon, who gladly provided her with a home built within and next to his castle wall. That castle wall is what you look through in order to see inside Irene’s House. I added a basement level with a secret staircase running from there to a hidden panel next to the fireplace upstairs. The basement is connected to old gold-mining tunnels throughout the kingdoms, and that way Irene keeps in touch with not only 93 her daughter but also anyone else needing help as she plots the downfall of the Dragon Prince. (It is her daughter who eventually achieves his downfall.)
That brings us to the happy space of Otis the Dragon. Otis arrived in his castle as an unhatched egg. He has transformed that rundown castle into a comfortable home for the many displaced orphans from the kingdom of the evil Prince. Castle walls loom in the background and surround a huge arrangement of rooms. One of the attic rooms shows the end of my epic story as the defeated prince is confined to an empty room with a skeleton in his closet.
Grandmother’s Bed
As you turn from the dollhouse wall, you come to the life-size Grandmother’s Bed. Most visitors can’t wait to kick off their shoes and climb in. It is the best napping and reading space in the house. The wall is covered with purses and parrots. Not sure why. It just turned out that way. Adults love it as much as kids, with its own reading light and lots of pillows and blankets. It is an extravagant use of space that gives me so much pleasure. Even if I don’t climb in for weeks, just seeing it there always makes me smile. And isn’t that what our spaces are all about, anyway?
The materials, the light, the potential and the possibilities; for work, for rest, for inspiration or simple indulgence.
Stages and Caskets
Sitting outside Grandmother’s Bed is the Theater of the Enchanted Forest. What’s onstage changes all the time. Different backdrops and characters allow me to do more storytelling. For this photoshoot, a cottage kitchen is center stage. An Instagram comment inspired me to create a set- ting for the telling of the traditional tales of Stone Soup and The Mitten. One setting is ready, but the stories will have to wait while I complete other projects. Do you ever have so many ideas in your head and not enough time to realize them all?
Keep turning to your left and you come to my Cabinet of Curiosities. It is filled with embroidered caskets, which is just a 17th-century word for boxes. The characters here are the same ones you find in the dollhouse. Here is the Enchanted Forest casket and another that is a portable theater for producing Aesop’s Fables.
The top of this cabinet holds a selection of dolls I created years ago to show the potential of digital embroidery and embroidery machines. I loved that creative challenge. As my thumb and hands become more and more of a problem for creating hand embroidery, I might have to revisit that technology.
The Closet
Hiding behind a curtain is my supply closet. This space was created from a small closet in the original bedroom, a leaky shower behind it, and an even tinier closet in the laundry room. Combining these areas gave me a much-needed storage space. I only moved some of the supplies from my old basement studio up to the new one. To this day, 12 years later, when I need something I first “shop” in the basement. I can usually find what I need there.
I keep a selection of wool and cotton fabrics and boxes of trims and tools stuffed on shelves. I also have some of my favorite toys and piles of old work here.
Right outside the closet door is my sink. All marble and shaped in a triangle, it was a lucky find at an antiques store. The plumbing already existed in that corner.
The Working Side of the Studio
When you step into the working side of my studio you are entering the room addition. It has a very different kind of mood and creative energy.
I still have the worktable from my childhood and use it every day! It has become a study in little tools. Pencils, pens, scissors, clippers, tweezers, crochet hooks, needles, paintbrushes, glues, tapes, clips, turning tubes, knives, colored pencils, markers, pincushions, notebooks. Then there is the sewing machine and a few threads. And nearby, another tray of silk threads sitting by the window. They make such a pretty picture but spend most of their life covered up to protect them from the sunny window.
My windowsill features more miniature scenes, vintage toys, and stuffed animals I have made. Bookcases fill the space below the windows. These are filled with how-to books or, my favorite, books of folk art from many cultures around the world. What doesn’t fit in here spills over into bookcases in other rooms of the house. Over all of this hangs a wool applique quilt of Newspaper Rock, a group of petroglyphs in Utah.
Another table offers room to actually put things together. All of my storytelling does require a cast of characters. That means dolls and costumes and backdrops. This is where the working side of the studio gets busy and, of course, very messy. No matter how simple the item I might be working on, it seems I need 20 different tools, a dozen fabrics and who knows what else.
I love getting ready for a photoshoot. Everything looks so neat and orderly. The next day it is real again. Dollhouse-building is the messiest of all. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The last wall on our tour has more books, more stages, more dolls and a door to the upper deck I imagined all those years ago. And feathers — because that job just never grows old.
An artist never retires. The work is mental as well as physical. As long as the gears in the head are spinning along, the imagination begs to be acknowledged. My imagination was my refuge during chemo treatments a couple years back. I didn’t have the energy to actually create anything, but I perused Pinterest as a diversion and surfed through Etsy for future dollhouse furnishings.
As I felt better, I started to work again. The more I worked, the better I felt. It is the best cycle to get into.
I’ve been feathering my nest for a very long time. My studio nest, that is. Finding a place to work has always been important for me. As a kid, it was just my half of a bed growing up in a two-room house. A bigger house meant a real worktable and a space I didn’t have to share with four sisters and a brother. The size and use of my studio space has changed through the years in the same way my work has evolved.
My first studio in our home of 40 years was in the basement. It was a walkout basement with windows and sunlight. I enjoyed it for many years.
One day sitting on a back patio, I began musing over the bleak rear facade of the house. We had remodeled every other part of the house, maybe it was time to take a closer look here, too.
I did a sketch of how I thought we might improve it. I added a screened-in porch on part of the main floor. Above that, I added an extension to an unused bedroom and then an upper deck to tie everything together. I left the drawing casually sitting on the dining room table. We walk by that table many times a day.
A few weeks later, my husband, an architect, said, “That’s a really good idea.”
My treetop studio was born. The unused bedroom became the cozy side of my studio. The new addition with lots of windows and light is the bright, working side.
The cozy side is inspired by an old-world kind of charm that I love. A hand-painted Hungarian table sits in the middle of the room and a built-in bed is partially hidden behind red drapes. The rest is pure Janet: dolls, dollhouses, stumpwork caskets, miniature stages, and embroidered pictures. I still own so many pieces I have created through the years. Early work was created for publications or manufacturers and, once the piece was photographed or shown at a trade show, it was returned to me. Now these works hang on the wall or are stacked in my closet.
Each piece tells a story. In the process, my studio has become a story, too.
The Village and Otis’ Castle
When visitors first walk in, it can be a bit overwhelming. Once your eyes focus, it is the dollhouse wall that most people are drawn to. It’s hard to miss. The overall 12-foot scene is made up of three main buildings: the Red House, Irene’s House, and the Castle. The Red House is at the far right-hand side of the scene. Built from a kit, it originally belonged to our daughter Jane. She played with it often, rearranging and redecorating all the time. Eventually she outgrew it, moved away from home, and left the dollhouse behind. It sat untouched for many years. I knew she didn’t have room or really want it in her own home.
I decided to redecorate it. You should have seen the look on her face when she found out! We had a good laugh over it, but to this day she loves rearranging the people and furniture in all the dollhouses whenever she visits now.
When I remodeled her dollhouse, I invented a story to go with its new tenants. Claire is a grown-up Little Red Riding Hood, now married to William the Woodcutter. Grandmother has her very own special room upstairs, complete with a built-in bed and painted ceiling. Claire was a village busker, entertaining her neighbors with fable puppet shows. When she and William married, they enlarged her puppet productions into Fables In Gables. Together they created stage settings and new characters and presented shows under the attic gables. The villagers loved it.
Some of the villagers live nearby. Below the Red House is a takeout shop owned by Jack Spratt and his wife. Next to that is the lumber- yard run by the Three Pigs. Straw, wood and bricks are always in stock. If you need a new ball gown, be sure to visit Fairy Godmother’s Dress Shop. Here you can enjoy a cup of tea while you decide what magical creation you want to wear.
The space between the Red House and Irene’s House has many little scenes of animals, tree spirits, the Village Life Press office, and even an outhouse. You never know who might show up.
Irene’s House is the next large structure and it, too, began as a kit. I needed a diversion while awaiting the outcome of our 2020 presidential election and Irene needed a home. Irene was the wife of the Dragon Prince. When she had the nerve to produce a baby daughter instead of a son, and then demand equal rights to rule over the kingdom she inherited, she was booted from her own kingdom. Her daughter was kept by the Dragon Prince. It was not a good situation.
Irene turned to Otis, the Princely Dragon, who gladly provided her with a home built within and next to his castle wall. That castle wall is what you look through in order to see inside Irene’s House. I added a basement level with a secret staircase running from there to a hidden panel next to the fireplace upstairs. The basement is connected to old gold-mining tunnels throughout the kingdoms, and that way Irene keeps in touch with not only 93 her daughter but also anyone else needing help as she plots the downfall of the Dragon Prince. (It is her daughter who eventually achieves his downfall.)
That brings us to the happy space of Otis the Dragon. Otis arrived in his castle as an unhatched egg. He has transformed that rundown castle into a comfortable home for the many displaced orphans from the kingdom of the evil Prince. Castle walls loom in the background and surround a huge arrangement of rooms. One of the attic rooms shows the end of my epic story as the defeated prince is confined to an empty room with a skeleton in his closet.
Grandmother’s Bed
As you turn from the dollhouse wall, you come to the life-size Grandmother’s Bed. Most visitors can’t wait to kick off their shoes and climb in. It is the best napping and reading space in the house. The wall is covered with purses and parrots. Not sure why. It just turned out that way. Adults love it as much as kids, with its own reading light and lots of pillows and blankets. It is an extravagant use of space that gives me so much pleasure. Even if I don’t climb in for weeks, just seeing it there always makes me smile. And isn’t that what our spaces are all about, anyway?
The materials, the light, the potential and the possibilities; for work, for rest, for inspiration or simple indulgence.
Stages and Caskets
Sitting outside Grandmother’s Bed is the Theater of the Enchanted Forest. What’s onstage changes all the time. Different backdrops and characters allow me to do more storytelling. For this photoshoot, a cottage kitchen is center stage. An Instagram comment inspired me to create a set- ting for the telling of the traditional tales of Stone Soup and The Mitten. One setting is ready, but the stories will have to wait while I complete other projects. Do you ever have so many ideas in your head and not enough time to realize them all?
Keep turning to your left and you come to my Cabinet of Curiosities. It is filled with embroidered caskets, which is just a 17th-century word for boxes. The characters here are the same ones you find in the dollhouse. Here is the Enchanted Forest casket and another that is a portable theater for producing Aesop’s Fables.
The top of this cabinet holds a selection of dolls I created years ago to show the potential of digital embroidery and embroidery machines. I loved that creative challenge. As my thumb and hands become more and more of a problem for creating hand embroidery, I might have to revisit that technology.
The Closet
Hiding behind a curtain is my supply closet. This space was created from a small closet in the original bedroom, a leaky shower behind it, and an even tinier closet in the laundry room. Combining these areas gave me a much-needed storage space. I only moved some of the supplies from my old basement studio up to the new one. To this day, 12 years later, when I need something I first “shop” in the basement. I can usually find what I need there.
I keep a selection of wool and cotton fabrics and boxes of trims and tools stuffed on shelves. I also have some of my favorite toys and piles of old work here.
Right outside the closet door is my sink. All marble and shaped in a triangle, it was a lucky find at an antiques store. The plumbing already existed in that corner.
The Working Side of the Studio
When you step into the working side of my studio you are entering the room addition. It has a very different kind of mood and creative energy.
I still have the worktable from my childhood and use it every day! It has become a study in little tools. Pencils, pens, scissors, clippers, tweezers, crochet hooks, needles, paintbrushes, glues, tapes, clips, turning tubes, knives, colored pencils, markers, pincushions, notebooks. Then there is the sewing machine and a few threads. And nearby, another tray of silk threads sitting by the window. They make such a pretty picture but spend most of their life covered up to protect them from the sunny window.
My windowsill features more miniature scenes, vintage toys, and stuffed animals I have made. Bookcases fill the space below the windows. These are filled with how-to books or, my favorite, books of folk art from many cultures around the world. What doesn’t fit in here spills over into bookcases in other rooms of the house. Over all of this hangs a wool applique quilt of Newspaper Rock, a group of petroglyphs in Utah.
Another table offers room to actually put things together. All of my storytelling does require a cast of characters. That means dolls and costumes and backdrops. This is where the working side of the studio gets busy and, of course, very messy. No matter how simple the item I might be working on, it seems I need 20 different tools, a dozen fabrics and who knows what else.
I love getting ready for a photoshoot. Everything looks so neat and orderly. The next day it is real again. Dollhouse-building is the messiest of all. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The last wall on our tour has more books, more stages, more dolls and a door to the upper deck I imagined all those years ago. And feathers — because that job just never grows old.
An artist never retires. The work is mental as well as physical. As long as the gears in the head are spinning along, the imagination begs to be acknowledged. My imagination was my refuge during chemo treatments a couple years back. I didn’t have the energy to actually create anything, but I perused Pinterest as a diversion and surfed through Etsy for future dollhouse furnishings.
As I felt better, I started to work again. The more I worked, the better I felt. It is the best cycle to get into.
