On the Move With Dandy Design
By Heather Gaghan

Animals of all kinds have always been in Emily Cornelius’s life. She was raised in Canton, OH on a small “gentleman’s” farm with goats, chickens, a goose, a dog and “…way too many cats.” For the artist as a child, life was fun and full of all the natural goodness of farm life with seemingly endless fields of green, miles of woods and meandering creeks.

Emily says her love affair with art began as a child as she “lived with art” with both parents working as professional art teachers and her father serving as Director of the Canton Art Institute, part of the Canton Museum of Art - which has been curating 19th and 20th century American Art for the past 63 years. “I lived creating art and had my own art desk stocked full of stuff to create. Pens, clay, fabric, string, ribbon, and of course paper and paints were all stocked items in our studio. Along with my art however, I was equally interested in music.”

Emily has studied percussion, since the tender age of six when she began her first drum lessons. She continued to pursue her love of percussion through high school and on into college where she majored in Percussion Performance at the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music. After graduating, she married fellow percussionist Jeff Cornelius and in 1986 she and her husband, Jeff both received invitations to join The New Mexico Symphony Orchestra- so they moved from Ohio down to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It was her connections within the Orchestra that Emily met up with fellow musicians who were also artists and who would inadvertently bring about the creation of Dandy Design. They invited her to participate in an art show and since she had recently taken a shop class at the University of New Mexico, Emily decided to create some large wooden wall sculptures inspired by her beloved and at the time, black Lab puppy, Dandy. Her original designs met with modest success, so one of the women at the show suggested she scale down her work to sizes suitable for magnets and ornaments. It was at this time Emily remembers that Dandy Design was created.

Emily recalls thinking in 1992 while pregnant with twins that starting her own company “…would enable me to have a flexible schedule and time to be with the kids… little did I know how much time it took to run a small craft company!” And almost 13 years later, time is still precious for the artist with her busy family life of twin 12 year old boys (who are both in the Youth Symphony in Albuquerque), a two year old, and their new black Lab puppy, Quincy, not to mention the rising success of her company.














The process begins with Emily creating all her designs on paper either by doodling a quick idea and editing it down for size, or starting with a tracing of an object and sizing it down to fit the products’ specifications. Emily works and re-works her designs until they are ready to be made into a rubber stamp or copied on paper for the wood cutter.

Each ornament design is then incorporated into a highly organized container system where each part is prepared for production where it is cut, sanded, base coated and detailed by one of the artists in the company. Raw wood is bought, milled, and cut into lengths that can be used on a scroll saw where each piece is hand cut—four at a time, then painted, detailed, finished, and ready to be sold!

With the holidays in full swing and most of us beginning to get caught up in the spirit of the shopping season, All Labs Inc. is proud to offer Dandy Design’s ornament line entitled “Dogs on the Move,” a collection of whimsical, multi-layered wooden ornaments with Labradors enjoying various modes of transportation from trains to planes to automobiles. They are a perfect gift for all those Labrador loving friends and family. See the full line of Dandy Design ornaments that we offer in our Christmas Dept.