A lot of people ask where I got the name “Marshmallow Ranch”. When my older daughter got engaged, we brought her new fiancé to West Virginia to meet the family. This was in the summer of 1994. She was twenty and her little sister was four. Yes…my children are just about sixteen years apart! What was I thinking??? Anyway, one sunny afternoon, we went for a drive. In West Virginia, when they bale the hay in those big round bales, they wrap them in white plastic to protect them from the rain. The farmer leaves them in the field to cure and before long, the grass has greened up around them and they look all the world like giant marshmallows waiting to be harvested. As we came around a curve, we saw them and my then four-year-old asked breathlessly, “Mama!!! What ARE those?” Her sassy older sister proclaimed we had happened upon the native grounds where the wild marshmallow grows. Here, they are harvested, cut into small pieces, bagged, and sent off to the grocery store for our enjoyment in such delicacies as hot cocoa or s’mores. My little one was stunned…till I made her sister tell her the truth!

Segue to 2002 and I had opened a small needlework supply shop in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. Needles and Pins was my sanctuary…my therapy to deal with a particularly painful divorce. I sold mostly cross-stitch supplies and even dabbled with some original designs. Cross-stitch designers all have very cute names like “Blackbird Designs”, “Cross Eyed Cricket”, and “Bird of a Feather”. If I was going to sell my own designs, I wanted a cute name people would remember. I was rummaging through a box of old pictures one day and stumbled across the one we took that summer day in West Virginia and I knew I had my name! Anything I made myself and sold under the auspices of Needles and Pins were labeled from the subsidiary…”Marshmallow Ranch”. Unfortunately, my needlework shop closed in 2005, but when I dropped to part-time work in December 2012, I decided to try to make an income from my own creativity. I cleared out a room for an art studio in my house high in the Rocky Mountains and dubbed it Marshmallow Ranch. So…here I am, creating jewelry out of antique silverware and maps and other ephemera. Stay tuned an see what creations come from this artist’s bench!