I spent a lot of time as a kid watching my dad build our vacation house in Pennsylvania on the weekends.  During the week while we were home he had a workshop down in our basement where he was always making some kind of project, usually something out of wood.  He is a perfectionist and nothing would leave that workshop until it was perfectly sanded and finished.  Needless to say the smell of sawdust brings back memories for me, and to some extent I find it strangely comforting.

I had never really done any woodworking myself, nor was I ever hugely fascinated with dolls as a kid.  I went to college, graduated with a degree in Architectural Engineering, and went to work in that field.  Then in spring of 2000, a good friend of mine took me to my first miniature show.  We walked around and I was fascinated by the variety of furniture.  Some beautiful hand-crafted pieces and some not so beautiful, mass-produced furniture.  As I walked around looking at some of the furniture, I realized it would never meet with my father's high standards of finish, which as I got older came to be what I expected.  I thought to myself, "I could do that, how hard could it be?"  With that, I purchased almost every tool I could get my hands on at that show (X-acto knife kit, pliers, glue, square, and some clamps).  Pretty basic stuff, but it was a start.  Within a week I had purchased a Dremel.  I sat down, a woman possessed with the idea of building furniture that looked more like I thought it should.

My first attempt was a dry sink, in fact the same one that is shown on my website.  It went pretty well.  There were a few pieces of wood wasted on mistakes, but the finished product was what I was looking for.  Then came a hutch.  Ha!  This was easy, OK, a pie safe.  That should be a bit more difficult.  Yeah, it was but come on, let's try something really challenging...  

At the time, I was living in an apartment and my workspace was the porcelain top of an old Seller's cabinet that my parents had given me.  I thought, "Wouldn't it be great to build that in miniature!!"  So I started.  Weeks later the finished product emerged.  It had taken a long time, but I was still dealing with just the basic tools that I had purchased at that first show.  Every piece was cut with the fairly cheap and inaccurate X-acto miter box and saw.  I knew I needed to invest in some better tools if I was going to continue or else I'd be pretty unhappy.

Shortly after that, I purchased my first house.  It's fairly small so a full size workshop would never fit, but a miniature workshop was just right.  I now have my own little space where I can create my Mill Pond Minis without creating a mess in the rest of the house.  Since moving in, the power tools have begun arriving but there are still more on my list still to come.  Patience is a virtue, right?

My only problem now is that I don't have enough hours in a day to spend working on all the project ideas that pop into my head!  Now if only I didn't have to work for a living...