I ran out of business cards the other day and I wanted to do a little something fun before I reprinted them. I don’t know how much people use business cards these days, but I do! I always include one in Etsy orders and people often pick them up when I do in-person shows. The back of my cards has always been blank.

Back when I did more shows where I was selling wearable pieces, I used to put a sticker on the back with care instructions for a piece and I pinned the business card to each one to act as a tag. I always used a sticker because I had so many different fabrics, it made sense to just stick on the right sticker versus printing many different versions.

But I don’t tag everything like that anymore because I realize that the tags just get beat up and tangled between shows and handling and was making a lot of trash replacing them. So it was time to put something else on the back of the cards. I have one from a sequin shop that I have stuck on my file cabinet because it has a chart of sequin sizes with little circles so I can see the size at a glance. That’s a handy tool! I couldn’t think of a handy tool to use for my cards. A ruler seemed too generic and nothing else seemed to really relate to what I do. So instead I decided that the most “on brand” thing for me was to add a project!

I decided to make a charted pattern of Stanley, my labrador. If you follow me on social media, you know that he shows up in about half of my feed. He’s a studio mascot for sure. I played around and came up with a version of him that I liked and then charted it out in Illustrator. As I was working on it, I was thinking cross stitch, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there are tons of crafts you can do with a charted grid pattern: knitting, cross stitch, embroidery, tapestry crochet, perler beads, mosaics, diamond painting… So it’s a choose your own craft pattern! I’m hoping that people will maybe want to hang on to the card because it’s a fun thing rather than just putting it right into the recycling.

I stitched up a version to try it out and I love it.

In the past little over a year I have lost three non profit arts organizations that were important to me. Two are shuttered and the other has changed their programming so much that I no longer have a place to be as a member. I was feeling a little down one afternoon and I gradually figured out this had been on my mind. I’m a girl without an art center. I’ve said this kind of jokingly before, but as I drove by the former-art-center-now-a-medical-facility today it really hit me.

I worked for a huge part of my adult life at an art center. I stumbled in to it, answering a call for school residency teachers and ended up falling in love. There are lots of kinds of art centers; some are media specific, some include theater and music. There was an art center in the town where I grew up and I loved it there, but it was more of a museum style place. I’d never been to a place designed just for creative people to congregate and try to bring some more art into the world. 

As an artist, having an art center to call “mine” has always been something awesome. In very practical sense, it gave me legitimacy. Being able to say “I am partnering with X Arts to do this workshop” let me write grants that got funded. Teaching classes for an art center multiplied my marketing reach by 1000x when my class got listed in their newsletter. The members of the art center community were a bottomless source of information and experience. Somebody always knew somebody who could answer your question or recommend you for a class or job.

And I also got to volunteer and pay back some of those benefits: staffing demo booths, graphic design, tech help, serving on the board. I could use my skills to make their jobs a little easier and their community a little stronger. It was a win for everyone. 

When I left my arts administrator job, I needed to step away from that art center I’d been a part of for all those years. Things had gotten a little toxic with some leadership changes and I needed a little distance. That was hard to do. But gradually I started “dating” some other orgs and found a few that seemed like a pretty good fit.

But today I’m back to being a girl without an art center and I’m not sure who makes a dating app for that situation. Maybe the thing I’m hoping for is a thing of the past. 

Artist, age 50. In search of a creative and welcoming art community. Looking for a long term commitment. Likes: innovative thinking and inclusivity; dislikes: gate keeping

So I guess the moral of this story is don’t take your favorite organizations for granted. Take a minute today and leave a comment or a like on a social media post, sign up for their e-newsletter, share something they are doing with a friend. A lot of the ways these orgs get funding is by showing that they are valued in the community and that means people are participating.

When I am selling my work out in the world or showing gallery photos while I’m teaching, a question I get asked pretty often is “Who does your sewing?” The answer is always “me”.

That question always surprises me. And maybe my answer surprises you too.

I don’t hear my pottery friends get asked “who does your glazing?” or the jewelry makers “who does your polishing?” but somehow the design and the sewing parts of what I do seem like they should be disconnected. I’ve heard other makers say that they hire out sewing or get things manufactured overseas because they want to spend their time on “more important” parts of what they do. Or that their time is too valuable to be used on sewing.

I am a pretty skilled seamstress because I have put in many hours of practice and I have an interest in being skilled at it. I have been asked many many times if I would “production sew” pieces for other people or if I would share where I get my pieces sewn, so I know it’s a skill that is much in demand. So I am always puzzled by the idea that it is a less valuable or integral part of what I make.

This week has been a week of what I call a “sewing days”. I was working on a wholesale order for a collaboration I am doing with the Guthrie Shop and another for a shop in Seattle that sells my work. Today, I hemmed and pressed tea towels, I hand stitched the finishing on scarves, I serged tiny rolled hems on the edges of chiffon wraps.

I love sewing days. I get to binge watch something on my laptop (today was NCIS) or listen to an audiobook and shut down the creative designing part of my brain to work with my hands. Being an artist requires a lot of thinking. I am constantly thinking about new designs to make, new classes to teach, statements I want to make with my work, creative ways to market it and a million administrative tasks like sending invoices or following up on contracts. It is refreshing (and necessary) to have days where I can turn all of that off. This is just as valuable to me as all of those thinking days. It’s a balance.

One of the reasons that I was drawn to being an artist is that I love to work with my hands. It’s more than just thinking “it’s fun”. It’s something I have to do. I just got back from a week-long vacation and I joked with several friends about being bad at going on vacation. After I few days, I am tired of seeing and listening and absorbing all the new things and I need to DO something. It’s like an itch. My brain craves that activity. (I can’t imagine going without at least one knitting project to work on. The horror!)

To be perfectly honest and practical, I am picky. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t afford to hire someone that paid as much attention to detail as I do. I don’t want my work to be sewn in factories overseas where workers are paid pennies for having the same skills I have. I don’t want half of that piece of art to be made with someone else’s hands.

So the answer to the question “Who does your sewing?” is enthusiastically “ME!” Because sewing is a skilled hand craft just as much as illustration and surface design. It is one component of what I make, just like glazing and polishing and sanding are in other art forms. I want my art to be something I do from start to finish and not something I do only for the “fun parts”. It’s a reason that I have always focused my fabric design process and business way more toward making vs licensing.

So when I think about that sewing question, I wonder what those “more important” things are that those other makers talk about. I can’t think of any.