DAISY ANGEL-MAKERS HAVE NATIONAL MARKET

DAISY -- Oak Ridge folk artist Dodie Eisenhauer and her team of country craft artists create angels in heavenly multitudes from the tiny town of Daisy.

Eisenhauer's company, Village Designs, puts out thousands of folk art angels and related items each year. The angels are sold in exclusive gift shops and catalogs across the country.

The angels are made of window screens. That's right, the wire mesh usually used for screened windows is molded into angels from 3 inches to 5 feet tall. Village Designs artists also form the unusual medium into bows, wreaths, baskets and candleholders.

The operation is in an unassuming white building and uses Daisy's only fax machine and only toll-free telephone number. United Parcel Service makes daily pickups and supplies are delivered by often bewildered tractor-trailer drivers.

If truck drivers miss the Village Designs building, they have nowhere in Daisy large enough to turn around. Trucks must travel miles down the state highway to turn around in a farm lot.

Eisenhauer has been a folk artist for 20 years. Most of that time she has been a painter. In 1989 she was struck with the inspiration to use screen wire as a medium for her art.

"I had ordered some wooden bows to paint and I hadn't gotten them yet," Eisenhauer recalled. As she sat at her kitchen table early one morning fretting that she had no bows, she thought of the screen wire sitting in the garage. She'd bought it to rescreen a door but never used it.

Hours later, she had bent and twisted the wire into bows and baskets and all sorts of shapes. "I was hooked," she said. When her husband returned home he took a look at her new creations and wasn't nearly as enthusiastic.

"I told her I didn't think this was going anywhere," Robert Eisenhauer said.

He was wrong.

Since her first show at a gift designs marketplace in Dallas, Texas, Eisenhauer has sold more than 50,000 angels. In addition to the ones made of screen wire, she also makes paper angels and tapestry angels.

Eisenhauer employs professional marketing representatives in Atlanta, New York and San Francisco. Last year she spent over $10,000 to ship orders across the country.

The angels are so popular, cheap imitations are being imported from Taiwan.

"We really have been blessed," she said.

Eisenhauer tries to repay her own blessings by helping stay-at-home moms in the rural communities around Daisy. She employs the artists to make parts for the angels, wings or poinsettia bouquets, and pays them by the piece. The artists can stay home with their children and earn extra money.

Rhonda Barks, who has two small children, said her husband teased her that she should get a real job until the week her paycheck from Village Designs was higher than his.

Lately Barks has been twisting 350-foot lengths of wire into Christmas trees in a process Eisenhauer invented. She calls it vine wire because the end product looks something like metal grapevines.

In addition to the at-home artists, Village Designs has four full-time artists who work at the Daisy plant.

Also helping out is Eisenhauer's 86-year-old father, who makes all the angel halos. "He is in his 10th mile of wire," Eisenhauer said.

Her father jokes that making halos for Village Design angels is really just training for his "next" job in heaven.

The operation has no machines except a paint sprayer. The artists use a pizza roller, screwdrivers, knitting needles and a denture toothbrush to shape the wire.

"And a lot of prayer," Eisenhauer added.

Recently Eisenhauer received some special orders for life-sized versions of her angels. The first pair are headed to a Ronald McDonald Charities fund-raising event in New Orleans.

She wasn't sure how she was going to ship the 5-foot sculptures and for a while thought she might have to buy each a seat on a Greyhound bus. The bus line since has agreed to ship the angels in freight.

She also is making three white 5-foot angels to decorate St. Paul Lutheran Church in Jackson.