Diana Taylor was born in Lafayette, Indiana, the oldest of four. She attended Purdue University briefly as a "Hoosier Scholar," and managed two art-related courses before leaving to marry at the age of eighteen. She raised four children as a military wife in Spain, Holland, and in the South. By 1981, after a couple of years consigning her work and selling at crafts shows, she established "Granny's Fan," a cottage-industry manufacturer of softly-sculpted items from vintage fabrics. She took the company to market where she secured orders from Macy's, Bloomingdale's, the American Folk Art Museum, and dozens of other retailers. Diana closed the company in 1989, went on to work for Leisure Arts briefly, and then spent fifteen years as a newspaper-advertising executive in Little Rock. During this time, she also rescued a historic house, joined the Arkansas Quilters Guild, traveled in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America, and was a founding member of the Little Rock Wind Symphony, where she played clarinet for ten years.
After 25 years in Arkansas, she left for the San Francisco Bay Area in 2003 to be near her grown children and grandchildren who had all arrived, one by one, ahead of her. She had planned to sell real estate, frolic in the bay, and play clarinet in a band in San Francisco. Instead, in 2004 she established Stickball, an artware studio producing a full line of ficklesticks "art" being sold in museum gift shops, artisan galleries, and other boutiques across the U.S. She gave up real estate and found out the bay was too cold, but she is still playing in the band. In the fall of 2008, she married an old beau and moved back to Little Rock. She is currently "doing the quilt show circuit" selling her book, kits, supplies and finished Ficklesticks art, and holding workshops and giving lectures for guilds and shops across the US. Fast, Fun & Easy Fabric Ficklesticks was her first book.
Visit Diana on the web at stickballstudio.com
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Fast, Fun & Easy® Fabric Ficklesticks
