Rachael Kinnison loves anything that’s truly old. She grew up around antiques and spent as much time as she could with her great-grandmother, always begging her to tell stories of her childhood and parents in the late 1800s. She stitched her first quilt when she was 15 years old from a late-1800s appliqué pattern she found in her grandma’s hall closet. She grew up admiring and appreciating fine craftsmanship and handwork in all things.
Kinnison has been painting and making dolls, bears, and miniatures since her early teens, drawing inspiration from her antiques. She specializes in 18th-Century Queen Anne and early-19th-Century dolls, hand sculpting them in papier-mâché, adding antique glass eyes, and dressing them in period-correct clothing. All are stitched by hand, one at a time, with antique and vintage materials.
Kinnison has dedicated her life to the study, collection, and preservation of early clothing. She sees them as not only historical artifacts or works of art but as priceless, irreplaceable windows into our ancestors’ lives and personalities. She uses the sales of her artwork, hand-hooked rugs, doll clothes, and dolls to help maintain her privately owned Lady’s Repository Museum of American clothing and textiles from the early 1700s to the 1870s.
A proud U. S. Navy veteran, Kinnison lives on the family farm in southern Colorado with her husband of 16 years and four children.
The entry deadline for the 2023 Directory of
Traditional American Crafts has passed. We are now processing entries and submitting
them to our jurors. We will contract entrants after the jurors have made ther decisions.
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