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13 February, 2025

Picot Beaded Edge: A Micro Tutorial

2025-02-13T14:41:28-06:00Tutorials|1 Comment

I learned how to stitch this picot beaded edge from a friend a bunch of years ago and one of my students in class reminded me about it today, so I thought I’d make a very quick micro tutorial and show you how it works.

First you need some beads, needle, thread, and something to stitch the edging on. For this example, I made a heart shape from two layers of felt. You can stitch around anything, but a circle is the easiest shape to start with if you’ve never tried this before. I am stitching with #8 perle cotton embroidery thread, a chenille needle (which is my favorite for embroidery) and some size 8 seed beads. This works with almost any kind of beads, but you just have to make sure that they fit over your needle and thread at least twice.

Thread your needle and tie a knot. I start by making a stitch between the two layers of felt so that I can hide the knot inside.

  • For your very first stitch, you will pick up 3 beads on the needle. Then move over about two-beads-width and make a stitch through the layers of felt from back to front. You want to stitch in about 1/16th of an inch from the cut edge of the felt.
  • Pass your needle through the last bead again from bottom to top.
  • For the rest of the picot stitches, you will add 2 beads to the needle. Then stitch through the layers of felt once again about 2 beads width away from your previous stitch.
  • Continue in the same pattern by bringing your needle up again through the last bead.

Once you’ve worked around the outside of your shape, continue adding picots until you meet up at your starting stitch.

To join the last stitch, add just one bead and then go back through the very first bead of the first stitch from top to bottom.

Make a tiny stitch and tie a knot right at the base of that bead and then you can bring the thread through the felt layers to bury the end and trim it off.

7 February, 2025

Paste Paper is my Nemesis.

2025-02-07T18:26:27-06:00An Artist's Life|0 Comments

I use a lot of handpainted paper in my work for making collages and illustrations from cut paper. One of the kinds of paper I fell in love with many years ago is called paste paper. It’s a kind of surface design where you cover the paper with a tinted paste and then draw, scrape and press patterns into it. The thing I love the most about it is that it tends to make richly textured patterns that are close to monochromatic, so you can introduce texture into a design without adding a lot of different colors. There are many theories about how paste paper patterns got started but it’s been a technique practiced since the middle ages.

Because I didn’t know how to make paste paper, years ago, I bought scrap packs from an artist named Cristina Hajosy who lives near Boston. I found her on Etsy and she sold these lovely scrap packs of all kinds of colors and patterns that she made in her studio. Then a couple of years ago I saw a paste paper class offered at the MN Center for Book Arts. I signed up immediately! My chance to learn how to make these cool papers.

Like many techniques, there are many ways of making paste and every artist has a favorite recipe. Unfortunately, the papers I made in that class were terrible. The materials we had to work with left the paper feeling very plasticky and the designs looked muddy. It was nothing like Cristina’s scrap pack papers and the instructor left us all feeling more confused than confident in making more.

I noticed the other day that my paper scrap bins were getting low on paste paper scraps because I am teaching more with them again than I have in several years. So I reached out the Cristina and asked if she could give me a lesson. I knew I loved her papers already so I decided that I should go right to the source. She and I spent a couple of hours talking all things paste this afternoon and then I spent a couple of hours playing in the studio.

Right now, I am cautiously optimistic? Everything is still wet, so I can’t tell yet if I have the texture that I was hoping for, but things look promising. My paste had some issues. We used a plain cornstarch and water paste with acrylic paint as the pigment. I cooked it up this morning but by the time I mixed my pigments in, it had gelled up maybe a little too much and it was sort of crumbly/chunky when I mixed in the paints. I am going to make another batch and try tinting it sooner. It seems I need to do a little tweaking to find just my perfect recipe. It’s always good to go back to being a beginner again at something and remember that it’s part of the process to not be great at something the first time.

30 January, 2025

My favorite scissors for mixed media art

2025-01-30T15:57:57-06:00An Artist's Life, Fabric Reviews|Comments Off on My favorite scissors for mixed media art

I shared a photo of my studio table in my newsletter today while I was in the middle of a project and I noticed that all of my favorite cutting tools were on the table, so I thought I would talk about what they are and why I like them.

I work with both fabric and paper often in the same project, so I unlike many fiber artists, I don’t have a dedicated pair of fabric-only scissors. My cutting tools include scissors, thread snips, and a utility knife.

I have two pairs of Fiskars scissors. The large pair has a non-stick coating on the blades. I love this classic bent handle shape; I know you’ve seen ones like that before. The small pair are a style they call Microtips. If I had to have only one pair of scissors in my entire studio, it would be these microtips. I use them for everything and the very fine pointed tips make them especially good for cutting fine details in felt or paper. Both of these are nice and sharp, hold an edge well, and work equally well on fabric, paper, threads, or cardboard. The best part is that they are super affordable and you can find them nearly anywhere. When they get too dull for my art, I retire them to the garage and the kitchen where they still work great for those things.

The utility knife is one I found because I was looking for a sturdy handle that was easier on my hands when I was cutting things like bookboard, which is very dense and hard. This is a handle which holds standard box cutter/utility knife blades. It’s aluminum and folds up with a push button latch. The photo shows it folded closed, which also protects the blade. It is THE BEST. It’s comfortable in my hand and holds the blade really steady unlike some of the xacto handles I’ve used. And it comes in about 10 fun colors.

Finally, there is my favorite pair of thread snips. The thing I like the best about these is that they are so simple. I have several other pairs with fancy molded handles and loops and this pair is the one I love. They came from my local yarn shop but these look nearly identical to the ones I have.

25 January, 2025

Every house should have a Playdough Board

2025-01-25T12:26:41-06:00An Artist's Life|1 Comment

I spent the week at my mom and dad’s house last week. I brought a handful of projects with me because the temperatures were forecast to be very chilly and I knew we’d be hanging out inside a lot. When I sat down to work on a book project, the first thing I asked was “Where is the Playdough Board?”

You might not have grown up in a house with a Playdough Board, but it was one of the most essential art making tools I had when I was growing up. It started out as the piece of countertop that was cut out to put in our kitchen sink. My mom and dad built our house. Dad is an architect and all-around pretty skilled crafty guy, so to save money, they did a lot of the work themselves, with 2 year old me toddling along with my tools and a pencil after him. When they cut out the space to put in the kitchen sink, they saved that large rectangle of countertop and it became the Playdough Board.

When I was a little kid, it was the surface you played with Playdough on, as the name suggests. We plopped it in the middle of the dining room table or more often the living room floor and the Playdough had to stay on the board (so it wasn’t getting smooshed into the placemats or the carpet). The board was smooth and indestructible, easy to wash, and just the perfect size for two little girls to build fancy playdough birthday cakes on. As I grew up, it became the everything board. Anytime you had a project that needed to be wet, sticky, taped down, pressed, stamped, or glued, you pulled out the Playdough Board to work on. In my house, there were a lot of these kinds of projects.

So when I wanted to work on glueing the covers on a new book project, the Playdough Board was the thing I needed and I put it right in the middle of the living room floor. It’s had an upgrade since I was little, so it now has a cutout to be a lapdesk since my parents aren’t so much into sitting on the living room carpet anymore. I’m starting to think that I might need to have one of my very own. Maybe I’ll keep an eye out at the architectural salvage places around and see if I can’t snag my own piece of counter top for future art adventures (and maybe a little Playdough.)

8 January, 2025

Sheep Blossoms: Designing fabrics for Darn Knit Anyway

2025-01-08T10:46:46-06:00An Artist's Life, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|Comments Off on Sheep Blossoms: Designing fabrics for Darn Knit Anyway

One of my favorite projects from 2024 was designing a set of fabrics for my local yarn shop friends Aimee & Carly at Darn Knit Anyway. The shop celebrated its 15th birthday last year and I’ve known them since before the shop was even a twinkle in their eyes. I thought it would be fun to talk a little bit about the process that goes on behind the scenes to make these fabrics come to life.

We started by talking about what the fabric should be. I gave them a list of adjectives so that we could kind of choose the style they were going for and they came back with “branded, playful and maximalism”. Since they are primarily a yarn shop, they really wanted to incorporate sheep into the design somehow and I really wanted to do it in a way that it wasn’t just a design that screamed “we’re a yarn shop”. We also talked about what they wanted to do with the fabric after it was printed so I could get an idea of the scale. Designing for something that’s going to be curtains vs small project bags are two very different fabrics.

Branded to me meant that we needed to use their brand colors, which happens to be a palette that I LOVE. The challenging thing about this palette is that they are all a very similar value so there’s not a really strong variation in light and dark. But fortunately, sheep are really classic to make in black and white so I decided to try and balance the black and white with the colors.

You’ll notice my photo up above is paper, pen and pencil. I do not draw my designs on an iPad or use Procreate. I like to make paper art as the starting point. So these started as many sketches on paper. I don’t use a lot of special art tools. I drew these on copy paper and inked them with my favorite Uniball pen and a plain old sharpie. Why do I work this way? I really like the quality of the lines and the art better. As I watch videos of other artists drawing with tools like Procreate that “correct” your lines and “perfect” your circles as you go, I just looks boring to me. No shade to those of you that love drawing with those tools! It’s just not my style.

I decided that one way to make the design a little playful was to try to “hide” the sheep in the design. I didn’t literally hide them as they are a pretty prominent element, but I treated them like they were flowers in a lush floral design instead of making sheep in a field or something more realistic like that. I rarely design florals, but I liked the humor of the sheep as flowers and sitting on and swinging off of the vines. I added a few other little knitting bits into the florals: the flower buds look like yarn balls, the vines all have a knob at the end so they look a little like straight knitting needles.

Once I had the initial design done, I scanned the art and brought it into Photoshop. There was a lot of boring little clean up zoomed way in on the design: cleaning up stray marks, making sure the repeat matched, adjusting lines that were too thick or thin.

I spent a lot of time coloring and experimenting with placing the colors. I used a Photoshop brush with an impressionist painting effect so that it added some variation to the color as I painted, so nothing was just big blocks of color. I really love to add a lot of rich texture to my designs, so this has two layers of texture over top as well. The pale yellow grid broke up the white blobs of the fluffy sheep and added a linen-like texture to the background. And then there’s a very subtle spatter paint texture over top of the black outlines in the same color as the background. This softens up the lines and gives it a kind of weathered look. Both of those textures were also things I drew or painted and scanned; I have created a library of subtle textures like crinkles, spatters, and linen that that I use often in my work. I ended up using all of the colors from the brand palette because they just worked so well together and because the values were so similar, it makes a kind of unified background that was a great contrast for the sheep. As a last detail I added the words “Darn Knit Anyway” along the edges of the vines in three different places. I love this fun little message hidden in the leaves.

Because they wanted to make some little drawstring project bags with these prints, I also created a coordinating print for the lining. I wanted to do something reminiscent of a ticking stripe and pulled the little twinkle star shape from the main print. I drew more fluffy sheep but instead of swinging from things, I wanted these to look like they were napping and their feet were all tucked under their fluff. My husband said they looked like popcorn, which made me laugh and I think also adds to the playfulness and the whole theme-in-my-head of sheep pretending to be other things. I couldn’t decide which color I liked better so I designed two.

It was great fun to work on this collection and I hope it brings lots of smiles to the community at DKA.

6 January, 2025

A Handmade Business Looking Back at 2024

2025-01-06T14:02:43-06:00An Artist's Life, Everything Else|1 Comment

I haven’t done an annual wrap up of my art practice in a few years and I thought it might be time. For the very first time in 2024, I sat down and wrote a spreadsheet of goals for my art business. I don’t know why I had never done it before but I thought it would be interesting to try it.

I participated in a webinar about goal setting with a group of other craft business owners and even though they recommended it, I didn’t assign numbers to anything, but instead made a list of things I would like to accomplish and assigned them to months throughout the year. Why no numbers? Because I really feel like saying “I am going to increase my Etsy sales by 10%” is really something that has too many factors outside of my control. I don’t know what the economy is going to do, I don’t know what Etsy is going to change about how people interact with my shop, I don’t know what sourcing my materials is going to be like and none of those things have anything to do with what I am doing for my business. So instead I focused on the things I can control, like how many new classes I was going to design and release and what projects (like adding a press page to my website) that I wanted to finish.

My theme for 2024 was “Use what you have. Do it better.”

Classes & Teaching

I started my goals with what classes I wanted to teach. My spreadsheet had a goal of teaching about 40 different new classes between online and in-person offerings. That is about 3-4 every month, one released to my website or Skillshare as an online class and the others as in-person or Zoom classes. I am really delighted that I completely blew this goal out of the water. Last year I taught 88 classes. I was actually a little astounded when I tallied it up and counted it a second time. They didn’t fit into my calendar the way I thought they would and I didn’t quite get as many online classes up as I hoped to, but overall I hit the goal and then some.

The classes offered on my website as on-demand classes are definitely the least “successful” of the options. It is so hard to get these in front of the right audience and it feels like a failure; I’ll be totally honest. This is definitely something I am going to take some time to think about in 2025. I have a lot of feedback that people want to take on-demand classes but something there isn’t connecting. And I have had some comments that people don’t want to take classes through Skillshare because of the membership fee, but I have about 50 students there for every 1 that comes to my website.

I also had a Projects goal to create a refreshed “Proposal package” to send out to potential new class partners like fiber art guilds, conferences, and art centers with descriptions, prices, photos etc. I did not get that done, but actually ended up accomplishing what I wanted to with that project which was to get set up teaching with some new organizations. I have 3 brand new partners for 2025 and I reconnected with a couple that I haven’t worked with in a few years. So success, but just not in the way I envisioned it.

Online & In-person Sales

Last year I did a check-in on my best selling items because I felt like something was off. I revisited that and added the data for 2024.

The good news is that the totals in 2024 were a lot like 2023. These stats don’t include my Etsy shop, but my Etsy sales were within 4% of the year before. Interestingly my visits went down and conversion rate nearly doubled. Which means more of the right customers are finding my shop. I’d love to see it grow more, but holding steady is great.

A big difference I see here is that the kind of in-person shows I did changed a lot. I am thinking pretty seriously that I am going to phase out the wearables/accessories/scarves that I have been making for many years. They aren’t all included on this chart.  They were very popular at shows prior to 2020 but customers and shows have changed and they just aren’t selling any more. I don’t want to make more because they aren’t really selling and the inventory I have starts to then feel stale. I am so sad about this, because I LOVE designing fabrics and making things from them.

One thing that’s not reflected in this chart is the number of shows it represents. From 2017-2023, I did about 4 in-person shows a year. In 2024, I did 8. Four were shows I do annually, 4 were new. That means that I did roughly the same in sales spread across twice as many events. When an artist tells you that their sales were low this year, that’s what they are talking about. I love doing in-person events and talking to people, but that was discouraging. (A big thank you shout out to everyone who did come to one of my in-person events!!)

I didn’t have any sales related goals in my 2024 spreadsheet because I don’t have a lot of control over that, but I did have some Projects. I cleaned up my Etsy shop, phasing out some things that weren’t selling or were more hassle than they were worth (embroidery kits, stickers) and adding some new items (books, large project bags). I bought a thermal label printer which has made packing orders quicker and having run the online shop for nearly 20 years that was a great little boost of positive energy, making the boring tasks seem a little more fun. I didn’t have it on my list of goals, but I converted 6 kits over to be .pdf patterns instead and those have been selling great in my Etsy shop. So even though people have told me they love the design and asked for kits, patterns are what they are really interested in buying. More of those for next year!

How I balance my business

Most of my goals relate to the way I balance my business. I realized early on in this adventure that relying solely on selling or teaching or exhibiting my art wasn’t going to work for me. I’ve made charts like this in years past and they always vary a little. I like to include grants as part of my balance, but in order to write a grant as an artist, you really have to have a big new project to apply. Right now they are all looking for you to create something new and engage people with that new thing and I really just didn’t have a big new project I wanted to do. I burned out a little on the last one I took on. So right now, this is how I balance. I added those 4 new in-person events to fill in that gap from grants and as I mentioned before I did a lot of new teaching. The “design” category includes things like graphic design contract work & website help that I do for other artists and non-profits.

Use what you have. Do it better.

My theme for 2024 really had to do with a lot of setbacks I’d had the year before. I had to switch up my classes & website hosting unexpectedly. Sales on bestsellers were unpredictable. So I decided to focus on using the tools I had more effectively versus adding a bunch of new things. This had mixed results.

My email service had a complete meltdown and I ended up moving my newsletter/email server to a different service. My emails were blacklisted and that caused ripples for months. I had goals about promoting my newsletter better and I just couldn’t do it because it was all in flux.

I took a bunch of classes on Skillshare about Pinterest marketing and tried to implement a lot of those suggestions. (Complete flop.) I took a couple of classes mostly for fun and skill building. I watched webinars about several different business topics that were mostly either too vague/basic or downright horrifying (ie using AI in your art.) I did meet my goals for learning & improving those areas but I didn’t really get the results I was hoping for in every case.

A couple of big-projects-that-I-can’t-share fizzled out because of circumstances beyond my control. I had time blocked out for them and they didn’t happen. On a super positive note, I got asked to do a couple of other fabric design projects completely unexpectedly and that was fantastic.

The biggest goal that I completely didn’t meet was to write here on my blog more. It just kept getting pushed to the bottom of the to-do list and I didn’t do it. This is definitely going to the top of the list for 2025 and I am going to try to structure the goal a little better. Maybe I need to assign myself topics ahead of time.

My top 3 designs sold for 2024

Other numbers of the year: I showed work in 4 exhibitions, sold 118 yards of fabric on Spoonflower & 25 rolls of wallpaper.

I looked carefully at all of the other print-on-demand services where my work was sold and decided to close all of them at the end of 2024. It ends up that the commissions I made there were not enough to pay for the time it took me to do the admin (updates, bookkeeping) on them. So goodbye to shops at Zazzle, RedBubble and Michaels MakerSpace. That might not sound like a lot of sales on Spoonflower, but I really only sell about half of what I design there. I have kept many designs for my own use; printing and selling finished products with my designs. Maybe it’s time to think about that too and make some more of those available. I’m not sure.

Wrap Up

Overall I am pretty happy with how the year ended up. My business and practice didn’t grow much “on paper”, but I think I learned a lot and I definitely feel a tipping point for letting go of some things and finding new ones. Now that I’ve looked at the year, I am going to spend some time figuring out what the goals for 2025 should be. I think having a spreadsheet was a great exercise and I have ideas of how to make it work better for me this coming year. I don’t know what my theme for the year is yet, but I was really struck by something Jon Chu (director of Wicked) said last night at the Golden Globes: “Making art that is a radical act of optimism”. That will definitely be a part of what I am thinking about in the coming year.

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