Faith and Michelle’s friendship started on the softball field back in 1998, when the two played together on a Jack and Jill team. Faith, the power hitter, took special satisfaction from hitting the ball over the heads of the men who moved in because there was a “girl” at the plate; Michelle’s prowess lay in an uncanny ability to find a hole between the infield and outfield, getting on base without messing up her hair.

The two quickly discovered a shared love of gardening, unusual antiques, rusty treasures, estate sales, and, most of all, finding a great deal. Combining Michelle’s artistic eye with Faith’s intrepid forays into scary buildings seemed a natural. But it wasn’t until they attended their first Farm Chicks show in 2005 - and they realized that their garages, basements, attics, and spare rooms were crammed full of the stuff that people were selling there - that they learned what they had wasn’t junk, but “inventory.”

A year later, they returned, but this time as RusticArts, a partnership formed to get around the one rule their husbands had, up to then, imposed on them: When asked, “What are you going to do with it, and where are you going to put it?” they weren’t allowed to respond with, “I don’t know,” and “In the garage.” The success Michelle and Faith enjoyed at the 2006 Farm Chicks show meant they no longer had to answer those questions at all.

In 2007, they renamed themselves the Dusty Daisies, continuing to salvage everything from old ice skates to bedpans to tool boxes to old metal mailboxes to wheelbarrows to milk cans to refrigerator drawers – and turn each into a one-of-a-kind work of art.

A passion for recycling, a delight in placing annuals and perennials in something other than ordinary clay pots, and an uncanny ability to see beauty in discarded objects makes for a lot of fun.  And for the Dusty Daisies, that, more than anything, is what it's all about.