By day, Ruth Latona is a high school art teacher.
On the side, she crafts baby bibs and bandanas, and sometimes teething rings and pacifier clips, under the name Tiny and Toothless — a brand she started in 2015. Many of the bibs and bandanas are made with cactus-themed fabrics.
Latona sews all the the bibs and bandanas herself, a skill she learned in a middle school home economics class. She sometimes draws and paints, too.
Latona, a high school art teacher, started Tiny and Toothless in 2015. The idea came about after making gifts for friends.
“It didn’t start out as wanting to be a business,” Latona says. “I was making things for my friends who were having babies, and I had some extra stuff, so I got in contact with one business, and they started carrying it. And I was like, ‘That was easy enough.’”
Ruth Latona, owner of Tiny and Toothless, grew up in Alaska and Arizona. She received degrees in Alaska and Oregon.
Latona grew up in both Alaska and Arizona, receiving her undergraduate degree in Alaska and her masters in Oregon. She settled in Tucson after finding a teaching job.
Latona says she became inspired to teach after being surrounded by teachers in her family and having positive experiences with her own teachers in school.
“For teaching, it’s really about setting another generation onto their exploration and their art journey, whether that’s as a career or a hobby,” Latona says. “On the flip side, sewing is more of my hobby. It’s really just my outlet. It’s just my calm, happy place.”
“I think that’s what art is always about. It shouldn’t be a chore,” she says. “That’s why I decided to become an art teacher. I didn’t want to have to make art as a business and sacrifice the creativity.”
As for sewing specifically, Latona says she enjoys the functionality of it.
By day, Latona is a high school teacher. But on the side, she crafts baby bibs and bandanas.
“When I was in college, I was a potter, and I liked to make wares people could use — that wasn’t something that was just going to sit on the shelf,” she says.
“I just love the interaction factor,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I’m a teacher — because I love interacting with people and art and seeing their growth and experience with the medium.”
Latona says her products are made to be durable so customers “don’t have to do anything special with them. You can just throw them in the laundry with the rest of the clothes.”
“I teach high school students, so they ask me, ‘What did you want to do when you were our age?’ ”
“And I say, ‘Exactly what I’m doing now.’ ”
