The onetime Queen of Crafting is still at it, and she’s right here in Traverse City.

Though she’s no longer a national TV celebrity (think Martha Stewart before Martha Stewart), Carol Duvall is still sharing the joys of arts and crafts – and doing so at Cordia, the senior living complex on the grounds of the Village at Grand Traverse Commons. “I’m eager to keep going,” she says.

For years, Duvall was a familiar face in millions of homes across America. She was featured on Home, aka The Home Show, on ABC. The hour-long daytime talk show, hosted by Gary Collins for most of its 1988-94 run, included Duvall and others during arts and crafts segments. When that show ended, Home producer and original host Rob Weller created The Carol Duvall Show for a new network, HGTV. The series actually started taping before the network went live. “We had 65 shows in the can before it went on,” she says. The show ran for 14 years.

Duvall’s show was canceled in 2005, part of a network-wide decision to appeal to a younger audience. Many of her dismayed viewers complained, and though HGTV declined to renew the show, it did run for four more years on its sister network, DIY.

Duvall also authored two books, Want to Make Something Out of It? in 1972 and Paper Crafting With Carol Duvall in 2007 (she says the latter subject is still among her favorite activities. “Folding paper and knitting,” she says firmly.

Duvall first broke into television in 1951, when WOOD Radio in Grand Rapids bought a local TV station. In 1962, the manager of the station moved to Detroit’s WWJ-TV and Duvall was among those who followed him, working at the station for 18 years. She served in a variety of positions, ranging from news anchor to producer. It was there she first started hosting her own craft show.

“My dad always said to be nice to the office boy. He might become your boss,” Duvall says. That’s almost exactly what happened. A former intern she’d worked with eventually moved up the corporate ladder, becoming the number two at ABC. That’s what led to her involvement on Home.

Duvall ascribes her TV success to being a performer who crafted – not a crafter who performed.

Though the show hasn’t aired in seven years, episodes are widely available on YouTube, and she’s often cited on Pinterest as well.

Duvall arrived at Cordia following years of living in a lakefront home in Pierport, Michigan, just south of Arcadia. While she loved the home, its isolated location worried her friends and family, particularly in the winter, when she had no nearby neighbors. Her daughter-in-law suggested they meet a friend whose mother had moved into Cordia. The four had lunch, and Duvall eventually agreed that moving to Traverse City was a good idea.

She’s been at Cordia for just over a year, arriving in November 2015. So how is she adapting to a much smaller apartment? She sold many of her creative materials in an estate sale, but she’s still crafting. And what’s her favorite recollection among her thousands of shows and tens of thousands of projects? Duvall doesn’t hesitate.

“My favorite was the geodesic dome playhouse,” she says. “It was excruciatingly clever. I got the idea from a catalog. I saw a picture and it gave the measurements.” She soon found that regular folks such as herself couldn’t buy the large sheets of corrugated cardboard necessary for the playhouse, which measured five feet wide by three-and-a-half feet tall. She finally secured large enough pieces from refrigerator and mattress vendors. “It took a lot of figuring out how to make it, and a lot to figure out how to explain it,” she laughs.

And does the Queen of Crafting miss her TV days?

“Sometimes,” she says from her Cordia apartment. “I’d been on TV for 56 years. Now when I meet or hear of somebody with a great craft idea, I (don’t) have any place to share it!”