Retailer crafts outlet for her creativity
Middlebury— Usually when Nancie Dunn attends the National Stationery Show in New York City she goes as a buyer for her Middlebury country gift store, Sweet Cecily. This year she’ll be on the other side of an exhibit booth, selling her handmade greeting cards.
Dunn started making her own cards about three years ago when her store was low on Easter cards. She took up marker and paintbrush and whipped out a small series of colorful cards to fill the racks. The first batch sold so well, she followed up with another.”It just took off,” she said. “And they’ve gotten better and better as I’ve done more and more.”
A graduate of the Philadelphia College of Art, where she majored in children’s illustration, Dunn has always felt the pull to create her own art. Frog Hollow Craft Center was just opening when she moved to Middlebury in 1972, and she got a studio downstairs where she worked as a graphic designer.
She created the craft center’s frog logo and worked with its artists and craftspeople to design their business cards, stationery and letterhead, shifting her own illustration onto the backburner for a while. Since opening Sweet Cecily in 1987, the Main Street store has been her priority.
Until three years ago, that is, when she found the perfect creative outlet in her cards.
“It combines my real love of words with my real love of illustration,” she said.
