Carol Duvall, crafting queen and host of HGTV’s decade-long program “The Carol Duvall Show,” has died. She was 97.
Duvall died on July 31 in Traverse City, Mich., according to her former daughter-in-law Rita Ann Doerr via the New York Times.
While everyone else was busy turning lemons in lemonade, Duvall spent her time turning household trash into treasure and teaching others to do the same. She first began her television career on a televsion show back in 1951 and in 1962, joined Detroit’s WWJ-TV network as news anchor and host of her craft segment “Here’s Carol Duvall.”
Duvall was then asked to join ABC’s “Home Show” around two decades later when a former intern called on behalf of the network looking to get a “craft person” for the program. When “Home Show” ended in 1994, host Robb Weller and production company partner Gary Grossman developed Duvall her very own program, “The Carol Duvall Show,” which aired on HGTV from 1994 to 2005, running for more than 1,000 episodes.
In her shows, Duvall showed audiences how to do simple crafts such as paper bead making, jewelry, rubber stamping and scrapbooking — almost always from everyday materials found around the house.
No matter what she was creating, her message always remained the same. “Enjoy what you’re doing. I think that, in crafting, comes first,” Duvall said back in 2011. “If you don’t enjoy and all you’re thinking is if you’re making a buck on something, then you’re defeating the whole purpose. So enjoy it.”
In addition to her on-screen career, Duvall published crafting books “Wanna Make Something Out of It?” in 1972 and “Paper Crafting with Carol Duvall” in 2007.
Duvall is survived by her son Jack, her two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.