So sometimes the path to writing a book absolutely doesn’t start with the idea “I’m going to write a book.” In fact, I’ve now written and illustrated four books and none of them started out as a book at the beginning of the project.

Snacks is the book I have been working on for the last year. Snacks started with slippers. Sometime in 2024 I ordered a beautiful felt slippers kits from a place called Joe’s Toes. I made them up and decided that they were a little plain, so I drew some felt humpback whales and appliqued them on the toes. They turned out really cute. They were such fun to stitch that I looked around and spotted felt eye glass cases made by the same awesome people. So I ordered some and made a few glasses cases for family and friends. My mom got a portrait of her dog, I made a green jay with edelwiess to celebrate my mother-in-law’s trip to Switzerland, my friend Goldfish Love Fibers got a goldfish.

I was having so much fun, I ordered some more felt. And I made a batch to sell at a local craft fair. I sold out in the first hours of the show. I made a few rules for myself: they had to be unusual animals; no cats and dogs. I wanted them to be the odd things that people love and not get trapped into making custom portraits of people’s pets. So I made tapirs, sloths, axolotyl, platypus, seahorses and yaks.

One afternoon, I decided to photograph them. I thought “I don’t know what I am going to do with these photos”, but I want to document them because I am doing so many different creatures. So that became part of the process: stitch the animal, photograph it, fold and stitch the case.

Then one day I made a list and realized that I had like 18 of the 26 letters of the alphabet represented. With just a few more odd letters like J and U, I would have an entire alphabet.

I’ve always loved alphabet books. I like that such a simple theme can become a story. So I decided to make the rest of the letters in the alphabet.

I’ve sold nearly all of the glasses cases that are the exact animals in the book. I decided that this was my most fun art recycling project yet! Make practical things for people to use and then use the photos to make something entirely new. I also love any reason to recycle my own art. For a long time, I have used parts of fabric designs as a texture in another. The previous books I mentioned all started as a completely different project and then I realized I had all the art, why not make a book?

So I stitched U (uromastyx, a kind of lizard) and J (jaguar) and all kinds of other animals in between.

How did it turn into a book?

Once I had the alphabet idea, I knew I would also need to stitch the alphabet. That was my project last year at the annual open studio event I do. I stitched alphabet letters while I chatted with people. These were stitched on felt coaster samples. I like working on thick felt as a backing and so I tracked down some sampler packs on Etsy.

Before I was settled on book, I thought about making a postcard set with each animal and its letter as a postcard. But I put a survey in my newsletter and “make a book” got way more votes.

So, then I thought this book really needs a story. Just having the animal and a letter is kind of boring. It took me a few months to come up with the idea of “snacks”.

I was talking to my mom and remembering a trip to a zoo we were on together. The zookeeper told us about this little river otter who always pounced on the food bowl very first thing so she could grab the shrimp. She would eat the other things, but the shrimp were her favorites and she would shove everyone else out of the way to get to them. The story made us laugh and we still remember it years later. So I thought, I wonder if there are other stories like this. Animals who have favorite foods or treats that aren’t the foods that are listed in their official stats.

So many emails.

I started sending emails. I researched and emailed dozens of zoos to ask about specific animals and their quirky snacks. I made sure that I was asking an easy question to reply to: an individual animal like a sea turtle and just one specific thing that their turtle liked to eat. I tried to explain that I wanted to know especially about their animals and not the wikipedia “what does this animal eat” answer. I told them I was an artist and I was planning to hand embroider all of the illustrations. I had a spreadsheet to keep track of who I emailed, what they said and other notes and comments.

Fortunately some of those zoos responded right away and their staff thought that the project sounded whimsical and fun, just like I did. I got some delightful emails back with funny stories and details. You could tell that these zookeepers and education staff really loved their animals as individuals with personalities all their own. This was the most fun research I had ever done for an art piece! I would excitedly text my family “Zebras like tomatoes!” I expanded my emails to also include rescues and other animal rehab or welfare organizations in a quest to get a real answer for every one of my alphabet letters. One of my favorites was from a oceanlife rehab organization who had a female red-footed booby in residence. They said her favorite thing was squid and she would grab it from the staff person and shake it (like a dog does) and spray squid slime all over the face of her keeper. They affectionately dubbed it “getting a squid facial”. A large-and-friendly national aquarium said that their sea turtles loved vegetables but only the green ones. If you gave them red and green peppers, they would ignore the red ones. Two local zoos to me – Como Park Zoo and Bramble Park Zoo – were especially friendly and chatted with me back and forth about the idea and their animals. It was conversations like that which kept me inspired by this project!

Other emails weren’t as much fun. Some places never responded at all. A small number of them sent me a long legal referral email to the marketing department about partnerships and licensing. A few sent generic “we are too busy to answer questions” responses. Those were bummers. The funny thing was that you could really tell the places that prioritized learning and sharing their animals and the ones that were “corporate”. Sadly for me, several places had policies about not quoting or recognizing their zoo by name for answering questions like this. I had big plans to put a whole list in the back of the book with thanks to everyone who helped, but I had to leave that out at their requests.

Finally I stitched the snacks; thanks to my spreadsheet of notes! I decided to put them on small pentagons and the letters on rounded squares so there were some shape hints in the book too (ie you know to look at the pentagon for the snack).

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wrote a non-fiction book! I drew my animals using a lot of reference photos from zoos, which I decided was a more reliable source than Google, which is so full of AI slop that I don’t trust it to be really a true representation. Every one of those snacks I stitched was because I talked to someone knowledgeable about that animal.

Making the book pages.

I put together each page in Photoshop. Looking back, I don’t think I would ever have sat down and embroidered all 64 pages worth of illustrations one by one. But since I did them as a whole series of other smaller projects, they were really easy to assemble. I have used the photos of the letters for several other projects already and I am planning to make an alphabet animal fabric panel/design too. I love how versatile they are.

Once I had settled on snacks as the theme, I wrote out the text for the book identifying the animal and its snack. My family helped me brainstorm 26 different words for eating something so each letter had its own verb to go along with it.

Armadillos slurp creamy peanut butter.

Boobies nibble squishy squid.

Every snack also has an adjective, often with alliteration or just because I thought it was fun to read out loud. I also realized I needed a little intro and conclusion for the story so I stitched a few more illustrations specifically for those pages. I decided that leaf-cutter ants would be a great illustration for the page where I talk about how I made the illustrations by cutting up and sewing together felt.

All together there are 95 different stitched pieces plus the cover!

For those that enjoy the technical details, I decided to print the book with Ingram Spark, who are a huge indie book publisher. I approached several print companies about trying to get it done locally and the cost was just too high. Because I am self-publishing, I have to pay all the costs myself up front. One place was really great and gave me a quote of about $14 per book, but in order for me to be able to make anything to pay myself, I would have to mark it up to a place that doesn’t make sense for a paperback kids alphabet book. Ingram was able to print it for about half that price. I purchased my first ISBN number so this one credits me as the publisher. (I printed previous books differently and they handled ISBNs in a different way). I should be able to make it available for bookstores and libraries to be able to order it but I haven’t set that up yet.

If you are thinking about printing with them, I have been pretty happy with what I have gotten but its *hard* to make sure you follow all the specifications and directions correctly and they have terrible customer service. It’s frustrating and they aren’t very friendly. I had two mis-print problems with the proof copy of my book. One was my error, which I fixed without their help and the other was 100% their fault and they have not yet responded to my support ticket. I’ve got a second proof that is great and I ordered a case of books and I have all of my fingers crossed that they are awesome when they arrive. (This is why I am not taking pre-orders. I don’t quite trust it until I see it.) Hopefully I will have them in the next couple of weeks.

Edited to add: The BOOKS ARE HERE.

A couple of weeks ago I posted something on my Instagram that said “I want to write a blog post, ask me a question” and one of the questions was “How did you get started in art?”

I always made art as a kid. My family are very creative, make-things-with-your-hands kind of people. Many many Sunday mornings when I was a kid were spent going out for breakfast (everyone’s favorite) and then going to the hardware store to get the parts for whatever Sunday’s project was going to be. I knew the difference between a phillips and a slot head screwdriver when I was 3 years old.

My first summer job was working at a summer childrens’ theater called Storybook Island. I applied to work in the concession stand at the park, but they instead put me in the acting troupe and said I could make all the costumes. We had a $200 budget for all of the costumes for 5 shows of the season and there was a lot of creative use of t-shirts in various colors paired with an assortment of capes and aprons made from the cheapest fabric I could find. I hated the singing part of the job, loved the costuming, and met my future husband there. I worked for 5 summers at that theater. We were super lucky to be mentored by a fabulous puppeteer & performer named Markie and she taught me a lot about building and performing with puppets. I thought I was going to go to college and be a theater costume designer and write plays.

Things happened. I didn’t love the theater department where I went to college, especially the head of costumes. I swapped to be a theater education major, thinking I would be the fun drama teacher at a highschool somewhere. They cancelled that major when I was mid-way through and gave me the option to be a high school literature teacher (UGH!) or general education. So I scrambled around, picked up some extra credits and ended up with elementary & middle school certification with specialties in math, earth science, and theater.

Not art. That was a question I used to get asked a LOT when I was doing different kinds of shows out in the world. Where did you get your art degree? Do you have an MFA? And the answer is nope to both of those. I did take several art classes for my degree (ie teaching art to kids) and the professor I worked with a lot tried to get me to switch majors several times, but the only media that they offered at my school were painting, drawing, printmaking and metals. I really dislike painting. I didn’t know what printmaking was because I never took an art class in highschool. (I was too busy with band and theater.) There was nothing with fabric or paper or mixed media and it all just seemed too snooty to me at my wise old age of 20.

I made my first website in 1996 after I graduated, while I was waiting for my husband to finish his Masters. I worked as a secretary for a little while for the college’s Gifted and Talented summer camp and substitute taught at the school where I did my student teaching. I was bored. So I taught myself Photoshop and made a website for our puppy, Lucy Thunderpaw. There were games and coloring pages and animated gifs. It’s funny to me now, but this time I spent learning Photoshop and html on my own has been infinitely more valuable to me than most of my college classes.

There were complicated rules about teaching certification between states so when we moved to Minnesota, I wasn’t certified to teach and I wasn’t sure what to do. I worked part time for several years at a local highschool as the assistant theater coach and costumer, which I didn’t have to be certified for. A friend sent me a job posting from a place called the Textile Center to be a teacher for their school residency program called the Textile Mobile. I got a crash course in weaving, dyeing, felting and kumihimo and worked my first residency at an after school program making quilts and embroidered badges with middle school kids.

While I was working all these part-time jobs, I started making things to sell. On the weekends I wasn’t working, I did shows and had a table at a local farmers market, making and selling puppets. I made hundreds of kid-friendly fleece puppets of every animal I could think of. The lions and dinosaurs were the most popular, but I always liked this mallard duck.

Etsy also came on to the scene about this time. I opened my Etsy shop just 2 months after Etsy launched and I have had it ever since. I started on Etsy making tote bags, custom laptop sleeves and hand embroidered business card cases. I made friends with some of the original Etsy staff. I was on Etsy teams, co-captained a new sellers mentorship program, and even travelled to Etsy HQ to be a part of their Sellers Advisory Board. The biggest thing I learned from having an Etsy shop was how to take great photos of my work. It was HARD to figure out and I spent years taking mediocre ones before I finally figured out how to do it right. (I’ll give you a hint: the answer is you need more light.)

I worked kind of insane hours and never took a vacation, but I loved it. The Textile Mobile program was my entire life and identity for about 12 years. I eventually stepped full time into the education manager role for Textile Center and coordinated all ages and flavors of education programs for the center. I worked far more hours than I was ever paid for, learned to be the substitute teacher for everything, cleaned up bathrooms and noxious vats of leftover moldy dye, learned inDesign when a co-worker walked out in the middle of a day, staffed countless demonstration tables, and had some of the best and worst days of my entire career. We eventually came to a point where we needed to part ways. The leadership at the center decided that they wanted to go in a different direction and I decided that was my sign to do something else. Towards the end, things had gotten pretty toxic and I needed to find a new path and some new inspiration.

The following few years are kind of a blur. I applied for and got three different grants from the State Arts Board, Fiber Art Now, and Jerome Foundation to make art and teach workshops out in the community. I co-wrote The Spoonflower Handbook with Steven Fraser and Judi Ketteler. I made my first public art installation: utility box covers for the neighborhood. I got accepted in to the American Craft Council shows (now called American Craft Made) and was interviewed on TV several times about my work in those and other shows. I started teaching everywhere in my community and at national conferences for the Handweavers Guild of America, Surface Design Association, International Lace Society, and Association of Sewing & Design Professionals. I taught several master class workshops at Spoonflower HQ and a workshop at Arrowmont craft school. I served on the board of directors for several arts orgs. I had so much non-profit experience at this point that I felt like I needed to use it to help support the local arts community.

And then the pandemic happened. And every single event, workshop, conference, grant project, or lecture I had scheduled were cancelled for the next two years. I dreaded opening my email to see cancellation after cancellation. I sat at my studio table and watched people walking their dogs past my windows and tried to come up with what to do with all of the unexpected free time. I felt like everything I had worked toward up until this time had just shattered.

I started taking online classes from the MN Center for Book Arts and eventually completed their book arts certificate program. I rearranged and experimented and shot so many hours of video in my studio trying to figure out how to produce online classes before anyone was really doing it or knew about Zoom. It was a lot of learning by doing, deleting, and trying it again.

Fast forward to now and things definitely look different than I thought they would in 2019. I now teach many classes a month online in various formats. I have transitioned my work to much more paper and mixed media than fabric and textiles. I am much less willing to volunteer or say yes to things that I don’t see value in for my art practice. I miss pre-pandemic events I used to do; most of those are gone now. I still post pictures of my dog all over my website.

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 here in MN. 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.

Updated to add: I actually got to “meet” her first foster mama from the shelter in KY via Facebook and she sent me this photo of the day that Olive came to live at her house because she was too little for the shelter to deal with. Look at that tiny little sad face.

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!