With more than 40,000 acres of vineyards in the Napa Valley, who has time to focus on a single grape leaf?

That would be artist Frances Padilla Brady, whose leaf-cast ceramics capture the essence of the valley’s most iconic vine.

“The cabernet leaf is the most beautiful,” Brady said one recent afternoon in her studio on Atlas Peak Road, where she presses the leaves into stoneware clay before firing them in her kiln.

The simple cabin, built by her husband Byron, is lined with Brady’s creations: From simple soap dishes in a variety of colors, to jovial Bacchus faces, to the elaborate “arch of cabernet,” a wall piece that can be customized for the buyer, everything she makes is inspired by her life among the vines.

Nearing her 76th birthday, the petite and energetic St. Helena native is the picture of active retirement, with a twist: Along with travel, volunteering and grandchildren, she has an active career as a potter, selling her pieces at Silver Oak Winery and at the Napa Farmers Market.

“I love it. I absolutely love it,” she said.

A child among the vines

Though she speaks without a trace of an accent, Brady was born to Spanish-speaking parents who had moved to the Napa Valley from Jalisco, Mexico in 1929. She recalls that she and her seven siblings were too busy to get into trouble as children.

“We didn’t have to find things to do. We had to work,” she said. “We didn’t play ball.”

Doing her part for the family, young Frances picked prunes, walnuts and grapes and often brought coffee to her father, Apolonio Padilla, as he worked in the vineyards.

In the St. Helena schools, she mastered English; after school, she held jobs at a local creamery and on the bottling line at C.K. Mondavi.

Her parents were protective: Jobs in Napa were out of the question. “I was forbidden to work in the ‘big city,’” Brady said. But before long, she was seeing the world as a military wife and mother, raising five children as she traveled from base to base with her Army husband.

When he was sent to Vietnam, Brady and her children came back to Napa County. Settling in Pope Valley, she operated the restaurant Fran’s Country Kitchen for four years as her children began to make their way through the St. Helena school system.

“All five of my kids graduated from the same high school I went to,” Brady said.

Quitting smoking spurred creativity

Brady and her first husband divorced in 1976, and she made the unlikely next move of applying for a job at Christian Brothers Greystone Cellars — becoming the winery’s first female tour guide.

Brady later worked part-time at Silver Oak Cellars before leaving to care for a grandson. Then, in the early 1990s, she quit smoking and found herself with restless fingers.

She “sewed and quilted like a woman possessed,” wrote and illustrated a book called “The Giving Vine” for her grandchildren, and helped her husband build a house, but Brady still felt the need to achieve something more.

Then she did what thousands of Napa Valley residents do every year: She enrolled in an adult-education class.

“I’d always wanted to do pottery, but I never had time,” she said.

Brady made up for that lost time in a hurry, moving quickly from pinch pots to more elaborate pieces. Looking for ideas, Brady found her inspiration in the vines she’d known since childhood.

“I looked at those grape leaves and thought, ‘they’re awfully pretty,’” she said.

Brady discovered that the leaves made perfect impressions in her clay, allowing for multiple forms from stand-alone leaf dishes to wine coasters and canisters wreathed in stoneware leaves.

As she mastered her new craft, Brady won blue ribbons at the fair and began her career in earnest with a few pieces for sale at Silver Oak.

Customers loved Brady’s designs and began asking for custom work; she’s made everything from a toad house to a six-liter stoneware wine bottle.

And grape leaves aren’t her only motif: Brady has used peach pits, pinecones, buttons and even lace to texturize her creations.

“I try to do as many things as I can,” Brady said, as her Jack Russell terrier, Digger, cruised through the studio.

A look back: ‘Times change’

After all the turns her life has taken over the past three-quarters of a century, Brady is philosophical — if wistful — about today’s bustling Napa Valley.

“I know that things have to change in life,” she said. “To me, Napa has always been the ‘big city.’

“But it’s really hard to accept the changes in St. Helena now; it’s really high-end,” she continued, recalling small businesses, long gone, that once lined now-tony Main Street.

“The few people I know come to Napa to shop; even gasoline is higher in St. Helena.”

Still, Brady holds no bitterness over the way the valley has grown since she was a child picking fruit and nuts in the 1940s.

“Times change,” she said.