My partner and I lived in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois for three years while she attended Graduate school. Champaign-Urbana, or C-U, is a small agricultural college town dropped into a vast sea of corn and soy fields, and I found myself comparing it often to my small Michigan hometown and nearby MSU college campus. During this time I cycled past horses and cows on the way to my bakery job, watched “Twin Peaks” for the first time, and wrote extensively about nostalgia, utopia, and quaint places with troubled histories. I began drawing the stuffed animals and dolls I had taken with me on this move, a bit embarrassed I still had them. Turns out a lot of people I knew had a stuffed bear or hand sewn doll they had held onto into adulthood and were more than willing to provide for a sitting. These texture-rich portait sittings improved my technical drafting skills. Drawing them evoked something between honoring and exorcising the object, allowing their owners a permanent keepsake when cotton seams reach their last mend.