Upcoming Classes & Events
Blog
Today’s moment of joy: What’s your favorite dessert?
The random question I drew out of my card deck today was: What is your favorite dessert?
Spoiler alert: It’s not ice cream. I am honestly not much of a sweets person at all. I just don’t have a sweet tooth. If I pick something to snack on it’s almost always salty or even sour. I love food and I love to try new things, but sweets are on the bottom of my favorites list.
I think my favorite dessert would be a beautiful, ripe, fresh peach. All by itself. I know. It’s weird.
If I am in a dessert mood, I always go for the option with fruit. I really don’t like frosting at all and you can keep the chocolate caramel overload. If I were to pick a more traditional kind of dessert, then something baked with fruit like plums or cherries, or key lime pie, or coffee ice cream.
The embroidered ice cream cones are from my Skillshare class: Sewing Sweet Treats. Those are much more my kind of treat.
Introducing Olive
There’s a new canine intern in the studio and her name is Olive.
If you’ve been around my newsletter or blog, you have probably seen Stanley, our beloved big dopey yellow lab. Tragically, we lost him in December to a rare complication of Lyme disease called Lyme nephritis. By the time we figured it out with the vet team, he was already in kidney failure. He had been vaccinated, but sadly, vaccines are amazing but not 100% effective and labradors are particularly succeptible to this horrible variation. We miss him like crazy.
I hinted about Olive in my last blog post. We had a really rough December here. Just after the holidays we also lost two very close family members and January was a blur of family meetings, crying, and travel. We decided that our house just really seemed sad and broken without a dog, so we started looking for Olive. My husband and I were secretly both looking at rescue sites without telling each other.
Olive came from Kentucky as a tiny puppy. The story we heard is that she was dumped at a month old with the 7 other puppies in her litter at an animal shelter by an old guy who said “You better take em or I’m gunna drown em”. Her paperwork says she’s a spaniel mix and she’ll be 3 months old in just a few days. She was just 3.5 lbs when she came to live with her foster family in MN. We found her through Safehands Rescue. I didn’t know anything about them before, but the social media algorithms saw me looking for puppy things and flooded my feed with little furry faces. She and two of her siblings lived for about 6 weeks with a sweet foster family. She’s not quite 12 lbs now (which is a big change from Stanley who was 104 lbs!) Puppies are a crazy amount of work so we are so grateful to her foster family who took such good care of her. Safehands Rescue was so easy to work with and I appreciate the care they take in making sure that their fosters find the right homes.
Olive is short for Olivine Pegmatite. Our dogs always have names with a story. Those are both minerals in honor of my father-in-law who passed away in January. He was a geology professor and loved dogs, so we know he would have loved her. Winter is challenging for all kinds of puppy socializing things so we are trying to think of creative errands to take her along. Yesterday she went to the post office and said hi to all the people in line. She’s already helping out in the studio by finding every tiny piece of paper on the floor to chomp. Expect more puppy art coming soon!
My 2026 Theme: Bring More Joy
As I started working on my art practice goals for 2026, I was thinking about choosing my theme for the year. I often have a short phrase that’s a goal for what I’d like to do more of in the upcoming year. Last year it was “Use what you have. Do it better.” That was great for me last year and I did think about it when I was making decisions about what to work on or change about what I was doing.
This year’s theme is a little different: Bring more joy.
We had a rotten end to 2025 with a lot of losses in our family. The landscape here in Minnesota right now is stressful and scary. And all I could think about is “How am I going to make art and run a business with all of this going on?” The answer was to find moments of joy.
There are a lot of hard things that we all have to find a way to get through, like processing grief and the loss of peace and safety in my community. One way I have found that helps me is to take a minute and find something that brings me joy every day. Sometimes that is really HARD.
Sunday, I sent a text to a dear friend who I haven’t talked to nearly enough in the last few years.
Monday, I stitched many stitches on a new class project with frogs, which I love.
Tuesday, I got to share the news about an art exhibition I was asked to co-curate. Such a fun experience.
Wednesday, I got some super-secret exciting news about something sure to bring a lot of joy.
Thursday, I responded to email subscribers who wrote me notes after reading my monthly newsletter. This is one of my favorite parts of sending it out is the conversations I get to have.
Today I also remembered that I bought a deck of “conversation starter” cards, like an ice breaker game with a series of questions. Coincidentally the theme I picked out for that card deck: JOY.
So I am going to try to answer one of those questions each week here on the blog. One of my other goals is to write more here and this I think will help me do that. So today’s questions is this:
What’s your favorite thing to ask other people about?
The obvious answer is their pets. I love to know all about your companion creatures. I have too many neighbors whose dogs I know without knowing the names of their associated people. Ha!
The less obvious answer is I love to know about the odd things people love. What’s the odd thing you collect? What are you passionate about? What’s your odd hobby? One of my things that I love is striped socks. I wear striped socks nearly every day; I hardly own any pairs that are a solid color. I have a few pairs with chickens and vegetables, but stripes are my thing in nearly any color or configuration. They are olive green with white stripes today.
So what do you love? Fess up in the comments!
An intro to my Etsy Shop
I made a new video as an intro to my Etsy shop a week or so ago. I never know what to put in these videos so I’ve come up with a “four fun facts” kind of script that I use. This one was fun to film. I used a gimbal style phone mount that helps stabilize a video so it smoothly moves from one place to another. My studio is tiny, so it’s actually kind of hard to get it all in. The alphabet letters you see in the video are embroidered felt. I made them as part of the illustrations for an alphabet book that I am working on which is entirely illustrated with embroidery. It’s been fun to have an entire alphabet and to figure out what else I can use them for.
Hi, I’m Becka.
Talking about fabric design, teaching, and the life and business of being an artist.
Teaching online and in person classes in embroidery, handcrafts, technology, fabric design and artist business skills. Co-author of The Spoonflower Handbook.
Making books, paper art and fiber art geekery.
Shop my art
Featured Video Class
Sashiko Inspired Squares
Latest Art
