About Becka Rahn

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30 January, 2025

My favorite scissors for mixed media art

beckarahn2025-01-30T15:57:57-06:00An 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

beckarahn2025-01-25T12:26:41-06:00An 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

beckarahn2025-01-08T10:46:46-06:00An 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.

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6 January, 2025

A Handmade Business Looking Back at 2024

beckarahn2025-01-06T14:02:43-06:00An 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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23 October, 2024

Tutorial: Leaf printing with Bleach

beckarahn2024-10-23T13:51:06-05:00Tutorials|1 Comment

I had kind of a quiet weekend and decided that was a great excuse to play with something fun. My sister sent me a TikTok video of someone printing leaves on a sweatshirt with bleach. It was more a “performance” than really a tutorial, so I used what I know about discharge or bleach dyeing and made myself a shirt. I walked over the nearby craft store and got a couple of cotton t-shirts in nice autumn colors. On the way back, I collected a big handful of maple leaves. I pressed these under a heavy book while I ate lunch so that they would be as flat as possible for printing.

Instead of using liquid bleach, I used Soft Scrub with bleach, which is like a thick paste, and a 1 inch flat brush. (You could also use the gel version.) I tucked a piece of cardboard inside the shirt to keep the bleach from soaking through. I laid each leaf on a piece of aluminum foil and painted the back side with a generous layer of soft scrub. Then I flipped it over and pressed it onto the shirt. I put gloves on for this step because I know my hands would itch all afternoon if I covered them in cleanser. I was careful to press all around the edges of the leaf to make sure I got that maple leaf outline. I let the leaves sit on the shirt for about half an hour for the bleach to do its thing.

You never know what color bleach will come out on colored fabrics. My olive green shirt bleached to a great apricot orange color! The orange shirt didn’t work quite as well and I have a couple of theories about that. First the orange was a lighter, heathered color with more polyester and so there might have not been as much color there to react to the bleach. Second I noticed that my soft scrub was drying out quickly on a warm windy day and so it wasn’t nearly as wet when I got to painting on to the leaves for the second shirt. That may have made the bleach less effective. This photo was the shirts after I had peeled off the leaves and the softscrub was basically dry. When I was done, I put the shirts into the washer and dryer to rinse out any extra soft scrub. It was a quick, fun project and I got a great t-shirt that I wore this week. If you try it out, send me a photo!

25 September, 2024

Making Business Cards Fun

beckarahn2024-09-25T12:14:19-05:00An Artist's Life|Comments Off on Making Business Cards Fun

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.