About Me


Around here I’m just called the “hatlady”. And that’s what I do more of than anything else. Thousands of hats. It’s what I started out doing in May of 1996, and somehow it just stuck with me.

In the beginning it was a single-head machine stashed in a bedroom. And an inventory of hats parked in the dining room…who eats there, anyway? Through the course of time I began taking over more and more of the house until it was finally necessary to move to a new one, so I could build a special addition just for all my “stuff”. In the year 2000, after running out of space there, it was time to buy a commercial building in beautiful downtown Walsenburg (where’s that??) so I could live in my business instead of running the business out of my home. Which is really the same thing, isn’t it?

By that time, I had increased my capacity to two single-head machines and a four-head, and they ran me ragged keeping up with all of them for a number of years. In the spring of 2007, I sold my four-head in order to bring things down in scale, and enable me to spend the cash for a laser engraver/cutter machine. And ya know what? I still haven’t figured out what to do with it exactly, except play around burning things up. However, it’s terrific for applique work, so I guess I should do up some of those to show you, and put them on display here.

Since I still work alone – and every duty in the place is mine – whenever you send a message, it will come to me… the one and only. I look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks!
Janet Valdez

wanna see me?