Andrea Holding uses homegrown lavender in her whimsical sachets.
ing coffee. “It’s a real rush.” She ensures good customer reviews by packing and sending orders quickly, but her efforts are not about putting food on the table. “No, this is for entertainment value, to pay for my hobby and for a little extra pocket money,” she says of her venture, named for the grandmother who taught her how to produce pretty things by hand. Even pre-Etsy, which she joined in 2010, Holding sold at her own pace. “When money became more important than the creating, I’d back off,” she says. Now she’s free to spend as much time as she wants on turning disparate bits into desirable objects. “It’s all about recycling and reusing,’’ she says. “That and doing it yourself.’’
yearning refusing to die. Through those years, she also liked to send letters and cards. However, Atkins, an African-American, rued the fact she “wasn’t seeing anyone who looked like me” on the latter. In the 1990s, she decided to make her own greeting cards, initially by pasting copies of photos of family members on card stock. Co-workers took note, and soon she was selling them. When someone sent samples of her work to Victoria magazine, the publication made Atkins its Entrepreneur of the Month. “Boutiques from all over started calling,” she marvels, and a sideline career was launched. It became more than that when, in 2001, the financial expert was forced into early retirement. Four years later, after her father and a brother died a month apart, Atkins channeled her grief into painting, again standing up to the insult of decades past. At first, her work was literally small and somber. Now it is exuberant and expansive. It also adorns her cards, joining the images of her relatives. The greeting cards are sold in specialty shops from Hawaii to Canada; the San Jose Museum of Art is one of her best customers. dorothypaints.blogspot.com
etsy.com/shop/RosaMeyerCollection
For Dorothy Atkins, a foray into art was squelched early on: Her seventh-grade teacher appallingly informed her she had no skill. “That broke my heart, so I decided to never draw again,” she recalls. Instead, she grew up to become an assistant vice president at Bank of America. For 20 years, Atkins drove from San Jose to Fremont, where she caught a BART train to get to her San Francisco office. She whiled away the commute by writing in a journal and making little sketches on a scratch pad — her artistic
54 • Scene • spring 2012
A lifetime of memories inspires the art of Dorothy Atkins, who started out making greeting cards.