I learned to sew from my Mom at a young age, so I had a wonderful technical background. I always loved animals and was a sculptor from the time was a small child. I used to sit in my room alone and create dachshunds from modeling clay for hours. Throughout my childhood, I drew and painted, did crafts, pursued art in high school. In college, I majored in Art only to switch to elementary education after a year and half, but did graduate with a Minor in Fine Arts. When I switched majors, I began making papier-mâché hand puppets with a vengeance. It was my secret passion.

For years, I never showed anyone my work, until my first year teaching kindergarten, when I hesitantly showed them to a few trusted colleagues at school. They were greeted enthusiastically by some but I was crushed that one teacher called them,"little uglies." But I took a friend's advice and began using them in the classroom. The puppets became the most effective and fun tool I ever developed as a teacher and fulfilled my not so hidden dramatic side. Initially my emphasis was only on the sculptural aspect of the face, but since each required a costume, I returned to my mom's sewing room to complete them where she kept encouraging me to add more and more detail to the costumes. Soon I was designing wonderfully elaborate costumes. I also developed some actual puppet shows, which required animal characters. The first was, "Snow White and Rose Red". In it, an enchanted bear transforms into a prince, so my first animal was a bear hand puppet with a zipper, which allowed the handsome prince to emerge from his fur. Later of course there were skunks, woodchucks, swans, etc who populated my puppet stage.

When my teaching career ended in 1979, I became a professional storyteller using puppets. Later, I teamed up with my then-husband Ray. We created Walk-Through Storybook Animated Villages for large department stores using our own sculpted whimsical human figures, which I designed and costumed. For one store, a new fairy tale was chosen each year with up to 150 different animated figures to design sculpt and motorize. Initially the characters were mostly human but soon, animal characters began to slip in. At first, I sought readymade plush animals to accompany our figures, but could never find the perfect match. So I began to design my own. I adored the process! It used everything I loved-drawing, painting, pattern making, sewing, fabric, texture, fur, animals, and sculpting. Plus I was able to rely heavily on the advice of the ever present little girl inside me.

During the making of Pinocchio, people began to ask me, "How much would you charge to make me a donkey like that?" I was amazed to think someone would buy the animals I loved to make. In fact I couldn't get the idea out of my head. In 1993, I took the plunge and set off for New York's International Toy Fair with a barnyard full of pigs, calves, sheep, lambs, goats, dogs, and bunnies. They were fairly realistic, half scale, posable, open-mouthed and synthetic. I didn't know why the shop owners kept asking about bears. I tried to explain that since so many others were already doing bears why would anyone need me to do one? The shopkeepers would roll their eyes, slip me a business card and say, "Give me call when you have some bears!" Franklin Mint contacted me later and asked me to create a bear for them in two weeks.

I had always wanted to make a little 3 month grizzly cub and knew this was my big break, so I got to work. I made my first bear complete with claws, open mouth with soft sculpted lips, sculpted nose, leather lined set-in eye socket with taxidermy eyes, fully posable body, trapunto leather paw pads, and realistically trimmed face and paws, and of course airbrushed. Previously when I had taken animals home to work on, I had always put them in the back seat, but this little bear, named, "Bubby" sat firmly on my lap all the way home. It was then that I began to understand what that extra special something was that bears had…

Franklin Mint never got the pattern from me. I was too in love with Bubby and knew I could sell his friends all by myself. Bubby still looks after me.

Mary