Diane Rivers

I'd like to introduce you to my talented friend, Diane Rivers, who builds creative birdhouses and angels from recycled pieces of lumber and found objects. It's my favorite kind of art - creative and functional. Diane builds the birdhouses to the specs of specific types of birds so these can be mounted outdoors. But I suspect lots of people use them as decoration inside their homes.

The angels are made from chair spindles!

While I have not yet been to her adorable shop in Wallace, NY, I have seen Diane's work in person because her husband used to work with us at my day job. Doug used to sell some of Diane's work to our employees. Before these one-of-a-kind birdhouses and spindle angels, she used to sell flowers. My dad still talks about the black (dark, dark purple) irises he had me buy from Doug for him years ago.

I thought I had written about Diane before so I had to look it up. Check out the look of her shop back in 2007.

She is very talented and has been doing a bang-up job lately getting the word out about her work, like this excellent blog entry by Kay Thomas. Kay is a far better writer than I, so I'll let her tell you Diane's story. (I bookmarked Kay's blog for future reference - she writes about the beautiful Finger Lakes region and some of the interesting people she has met.)

Diane's work can be found online here: 100Birdhouses.com.