CANYONVILLE — Helen Fortner didn't exactly trade in her paintbrushes and pencils when she delved into a new medium, but her old art supplies are harder to use these days.

“Pencils, paintbrushes, anything you see, they're rose holders,” Fortner said Wednesday, pointing to the tools taped to the arms of swinging lights and shelves.

Last year, the 56-year-old Canyonville woman began playing with a sculpting material that calls for one slice of white bread and one tablespoon of white glue — she uses Wonder bread and Tacky Glue — to make what she calls dough roses.

“It's just like Play-Doh,” she said, kneading a pinch of the dough into another red petal. “It's fun, it's like being a kid again.”

The recipe she calls Poor Lady's Porcelain is easily found online, Fortner said, folding the new petal around the already formed bud. Though it doesn't take long to make individual petals, the drying process is time consuming, and means making one petal at a time.

She learned the floral sculpting from a friend who was making tiny roses, but Fortner wanted to take it one step further.

“Sometimes I'm a rather tenacious person and I just started making them bigger,” she said.

While she enjoys her rosy creations, she says the recipe can be molded into anything, and if kept dry, won't mold. One of Fortner's neighbor boys uses the material as an adhesive building material for his backyard construction projects.

“He asks me for glue,” she said, laughing.

Letha Mitchell, Fortner's old neighbor and fellow South County artist, said watching her friend develop the unique pieces has been exciting.

“If you're a realist, you're a perfectionist, and she certainly is about those roses because they just look so real,” the Tri City woman said Saturday. “Even her first ones were pretty, but these kind of prove that old adage that practice makes perfect, because they just are.”

The two women said the dough roses are helping Fortner remold her life after her husband, Michael Fortner, died last year from kidney cancer.

The loss put a damper on Fortner's passion for portrait work and the sculpting offered her an outlet.

“Portraits are what I love doing and I'm just getting back into that after Michael,” she said. “Last winter, I got super compulsive and I had to make roses, I just had to make roses.”

The first batch she gave away as Christmas presents, but a friend took a few to her store.

“And, by golly, they sold,” she said.

With rising vet bills for her five rescue cats, the dough roses presented an opportunity to make some dough. Fortner said she's already starting to make money with her roses.

Before Mother's Day, she made about 80 roses and sold them in front of her vet's office in Canyonville.

She peddled all but 13 and plans to make another large batch for Canyoville's Pioneer Day festivities this fall.

Mitchell said she's watched her friend bloom as she honed her unique gardening skills.

“It's such a fantastic thing for her, because she has been grieving so hard since her husband died. This has almost been like a therapy,” she said.

Helen and Michael Fortner moved to Canyonville in 2004 from Salinas, Calif., where he owned a bookstore and she worked as a corporate trainer for Bank of America. Her duties were to teach new employees the company rules, such as how to count money. She worked for the bank for 27 years.

Though the corporate world of banking may seem at odds with the life of an artistic retiree, she says it isn't so.

“It's a different kind of fussing, meaning I'm as particular about my portraits as I was about the money,” she said. “It's a different kind of bean counting.”

• You can reach reporter DD Bixby at 957-4211 or by e-mail at dbixby@nrtoday.com.