After moving from her native Texas to St. Petersburg in 1987 Leisa attended St. Petersburg Junior College and received her RN degree in 1990 and is currently working at All Children’s Hospital in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. Leisa describes her work as challenging, stressful, but most of all rewarding! Her work at the hospital revolves around “family centered care” and Leisa takes her work past the “job” and forms relationships with the children and their parents. Oftentimes she helps the family create special memories of their children and their time the spent at All Children’s by creating hand and foot impressions, photo frames or memory books.

Not soon after graduation Leisa met and married Brad, one of the most supportive husbands around! Leisa feels that if there was an award given to “Scrubbies”-Scrapbooking Hubbies, then surely Brad would win first place! Currently Leisa and Brad live just minutes from The Doodle and share their home with Simon, Rex and Leo. These three cute Pugs often appear in photos in class projects, samples and funny stories from their dog-mom!

After an excited Leisa brought an altered book into the store for then manager, Kim to see she was quickly added to the teaching team! Her first year was spent teaching Doodle customers the fun art of “altering” anything from books to charms. These days Leisa continues to inspire countless paper crafters with her project classes that are usually filled to capacity.

While in college and in high school she also worked on a hobby that has become a passion in Leisa’s life-photography. Since she is The Doodle’s staff photographer you can see her work throughout our store and website and for the last two years Leisa has photographed some of our customer’s children with Santa. Once you see her unique photos you’ll see the ordinary from a whole new perspective. Another one of Leisa’s passions…er…obsessions is all things QuicKutz. At last count she was up to seven binders full of shapes and alphabets!! She has turned her love of this product into The Doodle’s QuicKutz Fan Klub where she serves as Pre’z’ident and hosts monthly classes and Klub meetings. In fact, Leisa was just named as one of QuicKutz Top 5 Innovators of 2006!

You could find Leisa burning off some of her boundless energy in one of many places-cheering for her favorite football team-The Chicago Bears, in a pair of sweats running through her neighborhood, taking photos of friends on the beach, traveling with her hubby or sipping a “venti” anything from Starbucks…but you are most likely to find her working on her latest project being inspired by her favorite quote that is painted on the wall of her studio, “Above all else it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that is why I made works of art.” –Felix Gonzalez-Torres