As I was driving back from getting a haircut today, I was thinking about writing this post. It’s not really about art which is what I usually talk about here in the studio journal, but in a way it is about color and I think that makes it relevant.

My hair started going white when I was about 30. My dad has beautiful curly white hair and has for decades. (He looks like Santa Claus; I am not even kidding.) It was inevitable that mine would end up white and when I was about 40 I started to kind of hate it. Not because it was white but because it was just boring. I absolutely admire people who embrace the grey and let theirs go beautifully silver, but that just didn’t feel like me. I felt blah.

I am an artist. I love color. I almost never wear black or white, but my glasses are bright orange or turquoise depending on the day. I do not own any beige furniture. My hair has always been a mediumish boring shade of brown. (My mom’s a redhead and I am still mad the genes didn’t go my way on that one.) And in my [read more…]

This weekend Two Fish Fibers was at the Shepherd’s Harvest Festival at the Washington County Fairgrounds in Lake Elmo, MN. Shepherd’s Harvest is Minnesota’s big spring fiber festival. There are yarn and fiber vendors (like us), demonstrations of everything from weaving on a warp weighted loom to sheep shearing, food trucks, and lots of very knowledgable and enthusiastic fiber geeks.

Our booth is known as Two Fish Fibers because the three of us  – Becka, Jen and Doreen – have been partners at this show for about 16 years. It’s really hard to do a show all by yourself, so Jen (Strawberry Moon Fibers) said “we should do this together”. Doreen (Goldfish Love Fibers) and I met as a blind date for the first time setting up a mock up booth so we could submit photos to apply to the very first show. Years later, we applied to another show and the organizers insisted we couldn’t go by just our names so we had to invent a new one. Since two of our logos had a goldfish in them, we decided we could just be “two fish” when we are together. So now [read more…]

When I think about the values I have in my art practice, I try to save time to do things to support the local art community. For years I worked at an arts non-profit and every weekend during the summer I did outreach and demos in dozens of tents and parks and farmers markets. I’ve done creative work like graphic design and website maintenance for several organizations. I’ve served on boards of directors for non-profits. I’ve been a panelist and guest speaker for arts events. All things I am good at and I love doing. Because I worked at a non-profit, I know exactly how valuable volunteers are to the success of a lot of programs and I try to be one of those volunteers when I can.

One of my favorite tasks (and one of the hardest) is serving as a panelist to review grant applications. You have to apply to be a panelist and attend a training session to learn about the specific grant and criteria to look at. Then, you read and score applications from arts non-profits who are looking to help lower the cost of tickets for musical events, or buy new sound system equipment, or hire [read more…]