After a career as a home economics teacher that spanned nearly two decades, Welch began working as a fashion consultant.

[9] At the completion of her junior year, on June 3, 1944, Barnett married her childhood sweetheart, William Calvin Welch, in Rome, Georgia.

[10][11] After graduating from Furman, with her bachelor's degree, Welch continued her studies at the University of Georgia,[12] before following her husband, who had been discharged from the military, to Wisconsin.

[7][12] Welch began her career in Madison, Wisconsin, teaching elementary school,[11] and the couple had their first daughter, Peggy.

[16] That same year, Ingenue, a teen magazine named her the "Outstanding Home Economics Teacher of the Nation" and awarded her with a trip to visit the fashion houses of Paris and Rome.

[4] In 1967, as part of an initiative for the Native American education service, she designed a scarf featuring the Cherokee syllabary.

When Richard Nixon won the presidency that year, Welch was commissioned to design a scarf with his slogan "Forward Together" as a commemoration of his Inaugural.

Welch designed Ford's official scarf, which she gave to visiting dignitaries, on a floral and polka dot background with the First Lady's signature imprinted.

She relocated to an apartment in the Watergate complex, but kept the[27] Alexandria dress shop until 1982, when she sold it to her daughter Genie Welch so that she could focus more on designing.

[30] In 2016, a dress designed for First Lady Betty Ford, part of the collection of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, toured the country in the Native Fashion Now exhibit sponsored by the National Museum of the American Indian's George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan and the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Massachusetts.