Thank you for visiting the Etsy shop, and congratulations if you have a wedding around the corner!

I make wedding cake toppers by casting liquid clay into handmade plaster molds. The cast elements are cut up and rearranged to make hybrid toppers with animal heads and human bodies.

This is a ceramic building process I began in graduate school, over a decade ago, when a surprise donation of plaster molds showed up at the school studio. I became obsessed with the slip casting process, and every smart-ass bone in my body wanted to tinker with the cute and generic figurines that the molds produced. I added Ken heads to deer bodies, gave lambs eight legs, and put chimps in ball gowns. Discovering Etsy in 2007 helped me find new homes for the vast menagerie building up in my studio. My Etsy shoppers encouraged the creation of wedding cake toppers, and the popularity of the wacky couples led me to open a shop specifically for these bridal oddities.

I would not have guessed I'd end up anywhere near the bridal industry. At my most glamorous, I still have clay in my hair. I have the introverted impulses of a person that spends a vast majority of her time listing to podcasts and making stuff. That said, it is an unlikely honor to make objects that people connect to personally. Couples select my toppers to represent their relationship and their love for one another and that means a lot to me. I imagine the possibility of one of my strange cake toppers being taken out of an attic box by great-grandchildren. And those kids knowing that their great-grandparents.....were a little nuts.