Welcome! Sans Souci Studios is the mask making and costuming shop of Carrie Rouillard. While I have been making masks all my life, I officially started Sans Souci Studios in 2000 and made paper mache masks until 2014, when I discovered the Furry fandom and realized somewhat queasily this was the kind of mask I’d wanted to make all along. Since then I’ve been trying to make up for lost time and become the Grandma Moses of the Furry world.
When I'm not making masks, I enjoy reading, collecting horse figurines, and spending time with my husband Brian, daughter Isabelle, and kitties Ezzy and Trixie. I also love to camp, hike and snowshoe. A secret ambition of mine is to join the company of Vermont cryptids such as Champ and his lesser known cousins the Woodbury Water Witch and the Sidehill Wampahoofus, donning my silly zombie or unicorn knit hat, going for miles along old town roads or snowmobile trails, and imagining that someone who saw me will wonder what it is that they saw. (Was that really a middle aged woman in a silly hat all the way out here?) Dragonlike, I search for and hoard serpentine, a semiprecious stone also called “Vermont Jade”, and “kindness rocks”, those rocks with inspirational messages and pictures painted on them, hidden in the woods. I have piles of these things and maybe someday I might share.
Sans Souci Studios is located in Barre, Vermont, the self proclaimed “Granite Center of the World”. It is a deeply inspiring place for an artist of any discipline to live, and it serves as the backdrop for many of the photos of my creations. “Barre Gray” is famous for its quality, being fine grained, even textured and weather resistant, as well as for its quantity, consisting of a deposit estimated to be two miles wide, four miles long and ten miles deep. With the arrival of the railroad in 1880, the quarries boomed and attracted immigrants from Italy, Scotland, Canada and a number of other countries to come and work in the stone trades. The Rock of Ages quarry is still active today and several contemporary stone workers have studios in the area. Sans Studios is surrounded by their work, from the Hope Cemetery, where stone workers often carved their own elaborate tombstones, to the Downtown Art Stroll, a self-guided walking tour that features fifteen granite sculptures, from the Robert Burns Memorial to the Gargoyle Bike Rack and World’s Biggest Zipper.
I hope you enjoy your visit and thank you for dropping by!
When I'm not making masks, I enjoy reading, collecting horse figurines, and spending time with my husband Brian, daughter Isabelle, and kitties Ezzy and Trixie. I also love to camp, hike and snowshoe. A secret ambition of mine is to join the company of Vermont cryptids such as Champ and his lesser known cousins the Woodbury Water Witch and the Sidehill Wampahoofus, donning my silly zombie or unicorn knit hat, going for miles along old town roads or snowmobile trails, and imagining that someone who saw me will wonder what it is that they saw. (Was that really a middle aged woman in a silly hat all the way out here?) Dragonlike, I search for and hoard serpentine, a semiprecious stone also called “Vermont Jade”, and “kindness rocks”, those rocks with inspirational messages and pictures painted on them, hidden in the woods. I have piles of these things and maybe someday I might share.
Sans Souci Studios is located in Barre, Vermont, the self proclaimed “Granite Center of the World”. It is a deeply inspiring place for an artist of any discipline to live, and it serves as the backdrop for many of the photos of my creations. “Barre Gray” is famous for its quality, being fine grained, even textured and weather resistant, as well as for its quantity, consisting of a deposit estimated to be two miles wide, four miles long and ten miles deep. With the arrival of the railroad in 1880, the quarries boomed and attracted immigrants from Italy, Scotland, Canada and a number of other countries to come and work in the stone trades. The Rock of Ages quarry is still active today and several contemporary stone workers have studios in the area. Sans Studios is surrounded by their work, from the Hope Cemetery, where stone workers often carved their own elaborate tombstones, to the Downtown Art Stroll, a self-guided walking tour that features fifteen granite sculptures, from the Robert Burns Memorial to the Gargoyle Bike Rack and World’s Biggest Zipper.
I hope you enjoy your visit and thank you for dropping by!
