Julie (Jules) Gissler grew up in the megalopolis city of Billings, in the Big Sky country of Montana. Her eye for color was first noted in kindergarten. There she arranged the painted folding chairs in a color-coordinated semicircle for show-and-tell.
During her walks to and from Rimrock Elementary School, she expressed a flair for storytelling. She and her friend, Shawneen, decided that an entire village of microscopic people lived in her winter hat. This spurred endless tales of these curious hat people. Then, there was the one particularly ambitious summer. Julie was sparked with a most original idea. She would sell rocks to the neighbors. Not ordinary rocks, but rocks that were cleverly painted to resemble tiny tennis shoes, the kind with the rubber toes. The shoes were wrapped with tissue paper in a shoebox crafted from index cards. A concrete shoehorn was also included, a very small, but significant detail.
Nowadays, living in Scottsdale, Arizona, her treasured daughter, and pound dogs, Larry and Harper, are her creative employees who inspire her daily. On a side note, there have been sightings of those hat people, and so, Julie’s imagination continues to flourish...
