Val has used desert and garden plants to create distinctive handmade papers for more ten years. Her lushly textured "letter folders" and post cards incorporate leaves and flowers collected year-round in Oracle. With her paper maché limited edition bowls, she captures the drama of rock shapes. With handmade books, she celebrates the bookbinding arts and her love of words. Recently she added Japanese stab binding, an ancient craft which lends itself to lively variations, to her hand range of paper works.

She has studied with internationally-known paper and book artists, exhibited at regional galleries, and teaches classes in plant-fiber paper making and stab binding at Tucson Botanical Garden and Oracle State Park for Environmental Studies. She is a career news and business writer whose enthusiasm for fiber arts began in the early 1970s, weaving gods' eyes and weed pockets with wool yarns she had dyed with native plants.