My Story

My Forever Little started with a small gray cat named Mochi. She slept on my desk for eleven years, mostly on my papers, always facing the door.

She got sick in the fall of her eleventh year. The vet stopped saying "treat" and started saying "manage," and I understood what that meant. For a few months I typed with one hand and kept the other on her back. She died on a Tuesday morning in January, at home, on the desk, in the spot she had decided long ago was hers.

Grief does strange, small things to you. I couldn't wash her blanket. Her water bowl stayed by the kitchen door for half a year because putting it away felt like agreeing she was gone. I had hundreds of photos and they helped less than I expected. A photo shows a face. It doesn't hold a shape. What I missed was the way she took up space in a room: the crooked sit, the ears that never matched, the small outline I'd see when I looked up from work. The photos had her eyes. The room stayed empty.

I found needle felting by accident, in a video of a woman building a sparrow out of loose wool. I remember thinking: if I could get Mochi's shape back, even small, even imperfect, maybe the desk would stop feeling wrong.

I was bad at it for a long time. Wool looks soft; the work is not. My first attempts came out like gray potatoes with ears, and I threw two of them across the room. So I enrolled in a felting class, and after that a long apprenticeship with a teacher who made animal portraits for a living. It took two years of study before I could look at something my hands had made and see her in it. Not a gray cat. Her. The crooked sit was there. I cried over a lump of wool at a workbench, and then I took her home and set her on the desk, facing the door.

That little figure decided the rest of my working life. I have felted pet portraits ever since, eight years now, and for all eight of them I worked for other people's studios. Orders came in with someone else's logo on the paperwork. I shaped other families' cats and dogs, read their notes ("he had one white sock, left front paw"), matched coat colors from photos taken in bad kitchen light, and sent the finished pieces off to be boxed under a name that wasn't mine. I'm grateful for those years. They taught me the ten thousand small decisions this work is made of. But the families were writing to the person holding the needle, and they never once knew who that was.

My Forever Little is the first thing I have ever run under my own name. It is not a big operation and I don't want it to be one. It's my table by the window, and shelves of wool sorted by color. The difference is that now, when you write about your pet, the person reading it is the same person who will spend weeks felting them.

Every portrait starts with your photos and whatever you want to tell me about them. We pick the reference shots together. Then I work, one commission at a time, in the order they arrive. It takes a while, usually two to three months, because there is no fast version of this that I'd be willing to put my name on.

Before anything ships, you get photos and video of the finished piece. If something feels off, we adjust it until it's really them. Nothing leaves my table without your yes, because a portrait like this only matters if you open the box and recognize your friend.

They loved you their whole life. This is a way to let their little shape stay home.