Jan Dressler buried her talent when she left college early, a frustrated art major fed up with entry-level courses that kept her out of the studio.
The Seattle native learned her deft fingers could make anything climb out of clay during a senior high school art class, her first.
After Dressler quit college, she worked a string of jobs in banking and accounting. She cleaned airplanes. Then children came along, and she again yearned to create.
One day a friend dragged her to a store that sold stencils. They were cutouts that could be used to trace patterns in basic shapes like rows of ducks. “I saw these things and thought, ‘Wow, what a concept,’” she said.
She had found her creative groove: Not satisfied with the stencils available, Dressler went home and began designing her own.
During the next two decades, she would transform stenciling into an art form by creating easy-to-use, sophisticated designs.
Today Dressler, 53, runs a mail-order business based in Renton, and has made appearances on Home and Garden Television.
Dressler talked about her rise to success and challenges of the industry. She also shared some basic stenciling techniques.
She got started hand-cutting her own designs and stenciling other people’s homes in the mid-’80s.
Knowing little about the industry, she attended a conference. She had brought some of her original designs, sketched on long rolls of butcher paper, and laid them on a table.
“I turned back around and I couldn’t see where I left them because the table was mobbed with people. And they were going: ‘Whose are these? They’re fabulous! Who did this?’ So I said, ‘They’re mine.’”
She learned that laser technology existed to cut designs, and she found someone to help her market and produce her stencils.
Her business took off when editors at Country Living magazine saw her work and invited her to stencil a home for a magazine feature.
Dressler Stenciling Co. Inc. operates from a business park a few blocks from Ikea.
Inside the building, metal shelves reach to the ceiling holding Dressler’s 800-plus stencil designs, packaged in kits with instructions, paints and brushes.
Her designs run the gamut from flowers and animals to bold geometric patterns and stencils that can be used in place of wallpaper. The designs look more like works of art than the cutouts that were the standard. One mural of a stone passageway looked so real a boy ran face first into it at a trade show.
Dressler became the first to create stencils on a large scale, making stenciling easier and faster. The laser machines used to cut stencils had to be enlarged to fit her work.
Part of the appeal of her products is it’s easy for even the nonartistic to replicate the results.
“They are so excited they can hardly stand it,” she said of her customers, who often send her pictures of finished projects.
“These people are looking at themselves as artists and now they are creating.
“That’s what floats my boat. That’s what makes me do what I do – to help people realize the creative spirit inside themselves.”
At the height of her business in the late 1990s, she employed 25 and appeared on HGTV, including “The Carol Duvall Show” and “Decorating With Style.” Television decorating star Christopher Lowell invited her to stencil an iris border on a landing at his Hollywood Hills home.
She now has a staff of five and the TV appearances have dwindled. “(Stenciling) is an art form. I think what’s happened is that reality TV shows want something fast. And as fast as stenciling is, they think it’s not,” Dressler said.
“They’re more into slap it up and go.”
She’s survived by adapting her art form to the changing market.
She has created designs that can be reproduced on curtains and wallpaper. If customers don’t want to bother with stenciling, they can throw a border on the wall with her designs.
She introduced murals to the stenciling industry and now sells more than 40 types. Murals combine a number of elements to create one scene. It’s possible to create woodland gardens, a stone wall with Grecian pillars or an enchanted garden with fairies.
She’d like to branch into home furnishings and decor too.
“I can do it all,” she said. “I am figuring out how to make it happen.”
Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@ heraldnet.com.
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