beadedpurserepair.com

Restoration is my passion, and a theme that runs through my life, whether I am restoring antique purses to their former glory, or an historic home that has seen better days. I recently moved to rural Nebraska and bought a Colonial Revival home that was built in 1935, once belonging to a very wealthy heiress and her husband. After ripping out wall to wall carpet from the 80’s and refinishing the original hardwood floors, sanding the texture out of the walls and repainting inside and out, and landscaping, it's a home that beautifully showcases my purse collection, along with other antique treasures from my family and my travels across the country.

My primary profession is nutrition management, and as a registered dietitian, I have been in the business twenty five years and have done many aspects of clinical nutrition over the years. For the past twelve years, I have been supporting people with developmental and intellectual disabilities. Seven years ago, I was asked to develop a specialized team of therapists that would evaluate people at risk of choking, aspirating, and/or developing pneumonia, at a care facility in Nebraska that was striving to meet the terms of a lawsuit settlement agreement with the Department of Justice. We've successfully created this team, and my three core members and I have had the honor of speaking at four international conferences in the past three years. Restoration of compliance for this facility has been an amazing adventure, but has been so time-consuming that I had to turn quite a few purse repair customers away until recently. I am finally settling down now and accepting purse work in manageable amounts.

Spiritually, I had an epiphany about ten years ago that helped me realize why diets usually don't work for people. Often, it isn't a lack of knowledge about what foods are healthy or not, it's the stress-induced non-hunger eating that sabotages good intentions.

Digging deeper into the spiritual aspects of this, I began to understand about strongholds in the soul--the mind, will, and emotions--that generate stress and lead to temporary relief by eating foods that produce endorphins. Sadly, endorphins are produced when we eat sugary, fatty foods, rather than celery sticks. I wrote a book, Soul Food: A Dietitian's Guide to Nutritional Transformation, and taught this as a Sunday School Class at a large church in Louisville, KY. Currently, I travel to speak at churches and women's retreats to present this information as one or two-day seminars. for more information about Soul Food, check out my website at www.soulfoodbook.com.

As for purses, I love displaying them throughout my home and adding to my collection. I authored a chapter on Purse Restoration in A Passion for Purses, by Paula Higgins and Lori Blaser, published in 2007 by Schiffer Publishing. For more information about the book, go to amazon.com, or consider joining the Antique Purse Collectors Society, at www.antiquepursecollectorssociety.com.