Warm welcome to the little workshop, friends, and please call me Rach, or Rachel, even if I tend to hide behind my pen name (Sydney Wren). Like Miss Jenny Wren, I’m a seamstress (who had a tiny sewing business for 13.5 years) now applying some of those skills to practicing dollmaking and dolls’ dressmaking! Another instance where Art influences Life, perhaps…?
A hopeless reader and daydreamer, I can well understand Lizzie Hexam’s tendency to stare at the hearth and see things in the hollow down by the flare. I may be generally as single & solitary a fellow as Master Humphrey (aka, the single gentleman in The Old Curiosity Shop), but I also, like Tom Pinch and Newman Noggs, delight in family and friends and in being a little useful in the world. If I can travel through life with something of the spirit of romance that remained always in the hearts of Master Humphrey and Mr Pickwick, with the good humor of Sam Weller, I will be content ~ and hopefully make some fellow travellers happier too.
When I’m not taking care of a beloved little niece or supporting residents in a group home setting, I’m usually to be found reading, writing chatty letters or scribbling notes for upcoming fiction, finishing edits to a modern-gothic novel (my “love letter to Dickens” rep’d by Maura Phelan of Green Light Literary), and practicing polymer clay dollmaking.
I’m greatly looking forward to revisiting my beloved Boz in approximately chronological order in the coming two years!
All the (Dickensian) Year Round 