During my childhood in Queens, New York, every Friday night was an adventure. My grandfather, who was a tailor in Manhattan's garment center, would bring home a new stack of small fabric swatches for me. Although they were all brown, grey, or black men's suit material, with variations of tweed, herringbone or stripe, to me they were a world of color and design. I would sit on the floor and arrange these pinked rectangles for hours. To this day, the feel and look of fabric brings the same excitement.

My father’s hobby was oil painting, but he discouraged me from trying. Instead, he encouraged the paint-by-number thing. Thankfully, my grandmother rescued my creative spirit by teaching me the basics of crewel work, embroidery and needlepoint, and I pursued these hobbies throughout my youth and young adulthood, mostly using kits.

After graduating college with a degree in mathematics, I became one of the computer industry’s first programmers. A successful career as a systems analyst and technical writer, combined with marriage and raising two children left little time for other creative outlets. Even so, at night I was usually using my hands, working on a sewing project or knitting and crocheting.

In the early 1980s, after a bout with meningitis and a long recovery, I left the business world to do community work. I also took a basic quilting class. When I had trouble making the points match or stripes line up, I embraced art quilts, first flat, then embellished, then three-dimensional, happily moving from my left brain into my right brain, finding joy in the freeform method of creating art with my beloved fabrics. I took a few workshops, but stayed determined to find my own voice and develop my own style.

For the last 20 years, I have been a studio fiber artist in northeast New Jersey, working in a “dry” studio for sewing and a “wet” studio for felting and teaching. My current creations are fiber sculptures and installations combining various fiber techniques with mixed media. My work is held in corporate and private collections and has appeared in magazines, galleries and museums, and dozens of juried and invitational shows, including solo shows.

My art is an emotional response to nature’s cycles and organic forms. I experiment, change directions, work intuitively, and don’t like to repeat myself. The work is evolving, always changing---like me, a work in progress.