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So far beckarahn has created 307 blog entries.
12 May, 2025

Greetings from H&H Americas

2025-05-12T15:23:51-05:00An Artist's Life, Out & About|0 Comments

I spent last week attending the h&h Americas conference in Chicago. If you’ve never heard of this one, I am not too surprised. It’s only 4 years old and it’s only open to craft business professionals (like shop owners). I’m not a shop owner but I do have a craft-based business and I am a member of the Craft Industry Alliance. I attended the conference with my Mastermind group, a small group of craft business owners (we have me, a quilt designer, a machine embroiderer, and a knitter/craft mom vlogger). We’ve been meeting for almost 4 years and decided that the conference was a great reason to get together in person for the first time. I’ll share more about all of them later this month.

I had an amazing time and got to meet and reconnect with lots of cool craft people! I took basically no photos at all because I was really interested in just being there and absorbing everything.

Since I mostly teach embroidery right now, I thought I would tell you about a few trends I noticed in looking at hand embroidery I saw at the more than 500 exhibitors that were there. Almost all of the hand embroidery kits I saw heavily featured the satin stitch, which is honestly one of my least favorite stitches. These are beautiful kits, but I think satin stitch is hard to master and can be discouraging for beginners. These are from Hawthorne Handmade (top left) and Stitches by Tiff (top right). There were also some great needlepoint and cross stitch kits. These are from Storyteller Stitchery (bottom left) and Junebug & Darlin (bottom right). The kits from Storyteller Stitching were honestly my favorites, even though I don’t do a lot of needlepoint, because of the beautiful handdyed threads in the kit. I am a sucker for really beautiful materials.

Two other trends you will see just looking at this tiny snapshot were landscapes and strawberries. I saw strawberries everywhere as bags, notions, on fabrics, and in needlework kits. I love strawberries, so that’s a trend that was fun to see!

28 April, 2025

Mini Tutorial: Making Price Signs for your Craft Fair Booth

2025-04-28T13:16:29-05:00An Artist's Life|1 Comment

I have learned that people don’t like to have to ask for prices when they are shopping at your art fair booth, so it’s important to have some kind of price signs that are easy to see. I have used all kinds of different methods for labeling my prices throughout the years: making one big sign, individual stickers, chalkboard signs, cute printed signs. I’ve learned that my very favorite is this one: drink coasters.

  • You can get a package of hundreds of recycled paper drink coasters for not very much cost.
  • They are easy to write on with colored sharpies.
  • The circle shape and bright white draws people’s eyes so they are hard to miss. (You can also get colors.)
  • You can make a new one in a minute and use both sides.
  • You can recycled them after the show.
  • They are designed to absorb a little water, so they don’t get ruined if they get wet.
  • They are sturdy enough to clip on to shelves, baskets and displays. I use binder clips to do that.

I save them from show to show, but I often have new items or new messages that I need to post, so I love having a bag of coasters and sharpies to make new signs on the fly. I also use them for “bullet points” about my items like the note that the bags are made from recycled plastic bottles or to say I have “other animal designs available, ask for your favorite”.

19 April, 2025

Embroidering a Koala in 3 Minutes

2025-04-19T13:08:04-05:00An Artist's Life, Embroidery, Videos|Comments Off on Embroidering a Koala in 3 Minutes

I’ve been having a lot of fun embroidering an entire zoo full of animals. Here is a koala from start to finish. This took about 33 minutes to stitch and I have reduced it down to just under 3 minutes. It’s wool felt, embroidered with perle cotton onto a wool felt eyeglasses case. I drew the koala in Illustrator first and printed a pattern on freezer paper. This is easier for me than doing a pencil sketch because I can adjust the size to fit in exactly the space I need and I can reuse those pattern pieces again and again.

15 April, 2025

Mini Tutorial: How to Tie a Square Knot

2025-04-15T11:46:43-05:00Tutorials, Videos|Comments Off on Mini Tutorial: How to Tie a Square Knot

I use square knots often in class projects and I had a whole group recently that had never done one before so I thought I would make a very fast video tutorial. When I learned to tie a square knot in Girl Scouts a zillion years ago, we learned the mneumonic “left over right, right over left” to help remember the steps. In a class I took a few days ago she said “short over long, short over long”. Both of those work great!

Think to yourself “left over right, right over left” or “short over long” as you watch my hands tie the square knot in this video.

9 April, 2025

The Power of Answering Questions

2025-04-09T15:42:29-05:00An Artist's Life|Comments Off on The Power of Answering Questions

I’m working right now on a big art project that requires a little research. I love doing research and this project is especially fun because it involves animals.

Google has gotten less and less reliable for information that you can trust to not be something that an AI bot invented, so I wanted to go directly to the source, which means I have been emailing zoos, aquariums, and rescue organizations to ask for some simple animal facts. I tried to keep my questions easy to answer: asking for one specific fact about a particular animal. The responses to my questions have been really interesting and wildly different.

More than half of the places I contacted haven’t responded at all. Which I guess isn’t completely unexpected although it’s kind of disappointing. The ones that really stand out to me are the ones who have responded in a really negative way. I’ve had three emails that basically say: “We get too many requests like this every day and we just don’t take the time to answer questions. We are sure you will understand.”

It’s ironic that they took the time to email me to tell me that they don’t have time to answer emails. While I am sure that they do get lots of emails and I understand that, I can’t imagine ever responding that way to someone who emailed me with a question. It feels exactly like they are saying “Your project is so dumb that it’s not worth our time to answer you.” It’s amazing how much rejections like that are discouraging.

To contrast that, some organizations have been amazing: sending me friendly, chatty emails about their animals and answering with exactly the facts I needed. Some have pointed me to extra resources or other organizations that they thought might give me some additional details. I’ve gotten to know a couple of animals by name and talked to their caretakers that work closely with them every day. (Myrtle the sea turtle likes to eat cucumbers as a treat.) The project has grown and expanded; I’ve added new ideas because of these conversations.

The project now feels like a collaboration with these great new people I’ve met; a feeling of community that comes from sharing stories with someone else. And when I finish this project, I get to share those stories over and over again with more people. All because I asked a question and someone took the time to answer.

20 March, 2025

How do I Start to Learn Hand Embroidery?

2025-03-20T17:19:48-05:00Embroidery, Everything Else|1 Comment

I had a great email question a few days ago from a person who wanted to know how to get started learning to do hand embroidery. A friend of hers had taken several of my classes and said “Talk to Becka!” but she didn’t know what to choose. So I thought it would be helpful to write a post to help everyone find the right place for you to get started learning to embroider with me. I teach in a whole bunch of different formats so it can be hard to know where to start. Whether you like to learn in-person, online, from a book, from a pattern, or one-on-one, I’ve got everything broken down so you can find the right fit for you.

Beginners start here.

  • Check my Classes & Events page for upcoming Zoom and in-person classes. These class projects usually feature 1-3 different stitches so you can get an idea if you like to embroider and all of the materials are included so you don’t have to go out and buy a bunch of tools and materials.
  • If you like to work from written instructions, then check out the patterns in my Etsy shop. The Sheep, Cat and Dog are especially great for beginners. These patterns need just basic materials like scissors, needle, thread, and some felt and they have a QR code link to demo videos of each stitch.
  • If you like to work from videos, then look on my Online Classes page. The Tropical Fish Bag or Sashiko Inspired Squares are great beginner classes. These each have a printed fabric panel with guidelines on it to help you make your stitches. You can order these from my Spoonflower shop and use any embroidery threads you have already.

Then try…

Ready for a challenge…

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