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.

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.

18 March, 2025

Teacher Tips: What to do when a class gets cancelled

2025-03-18T12:41:01-05:00An Artist's Life, Classes & Teaching|Comments Off on Teacher Tips: What to do when a class gets cancelled

I’ve been teaching for more than 20 years as an independent contractor. That means that most of the time, I am partnered up with an organization like my county library system, an art center, shop or museum and teaching a class with them. Sometimes those classes get cancelled. There are lots of different reasons for that (like pandemics and weather) but most often it’s because there are not enough people signed up to make the math work out. So I thought I’d write a little about what I do when a class gets cancelled, especially for those of you who might be new to teaching or thinking about teaching your first class.

Don’t take it personally.

My first tip is to not take it personally. There are so many reasons that people don’t sign up for classes and almost all of them have nothing to do with you. I was supposed to teach a class tonight, which is why this topic is on my mind. We realized much later after we set the date for this one, that it falls right in the middle of spring break for the school district that art center is in. Oops. I don’t live in that district so I didn’t even think about that, but it means a lot of people are busy. I’m also a new teacher for this venue. Which means the community there doesn’t know me yet.

Before I worked as an artist full time, I was the education administrator at an art center. I scheduled all of the adults classes. It happened SO often there that we had a kind of unwritten expectation that a class would always cancel the very first time you offered it. There’s a commonly quoted stat that says someone has to see something like an ad 7 times before they will act on it. I think this is the case with these classes. People only registered the second time they saw it, thinking “Oh it looked fun, that must be popular since it’s there again, I should sign up”.

It’s really discouraging, don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of work that goes into proposing and planning a class that can seem like a waste so I have some other things I do to try and capture some of that back in a positive way.

Talk to your partner.

Communicate with your partner org. Often they are the ones taking registrations and talking to people about the class much more than I am. What questions did people ask about the class? Was there “buzz”?

I once answered a “call for class proposals” from a shop who said their customers were super enthusiastic about a class on needle felting. But that class was cancelled without a single registration. Based on the feedback the shop got, I think it was priced too high because of the tools and materials needed to get you started in a total beginners class. In retrospect, it would have maybe been better to do a demo or a tiny make-and-take project that could act like an appetizer for class. That was valuable information.

Recently I pitched a class to one organization and they didn’t love the project and so we did something else. But I saved it and pitched the same project again to a different partner, who added it to the schedule. The students loved it so much, one suggested I do a whole series of classes based around the theme of that project. I trust my partner orgs to know their community (who they work with every day) better than I do and I think both orgs made the right call.

What can you reuse?

Classes take a lot of preparation. There is a project to design, samples to make, materials to select. When a class is cancelled, I look at what I’ve got prepared and think about how else I could use it because I’ve already done all of that work. So the first thing I think about is: could I teach this in a different format?

  • Could it be an online class?
  • A pattern to sell on Etsy?
  • A tutorial for my blog?
  • A make-along or educational posts on social media?
  • Could I combine it with another project to make a more advanced class? Or simplify it more for beginners?

I almost never teach something once and drop it. I like to think of my classes having more of a life cycle that I can adapt and grow and change to use different ways.

Look at everything with a fresh eye.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is a really common phrase but we absolutely all do it. The title, description and photo that go with your class are a tiny bit of information that are trying to communicate so much information. I was working on proposals for a conference yesterday that had a 450 character limit to describe a 2 day class. Getting all of the info for 2 days of class into 3-4 sentences is HARD.

Before I put it out there again, I look at everything that I used to represent the class and try to change it up. Sometimes I make new samples to photograph or just take new photos of the samples I have. I look at the description and think about how I might change the focus or “vibe” of the class. Can I rewrite it to sound more casual? more structured? more technique focused? What fits with the other classes that are being taught at that venue? How can I change the title to make it more clear/fun/appealing?

I try to get someone else to read the description and ask me questions about it. What doesn’t make sense? Or have someone describe back to me what they think is going to happen in class when they read the description.

I remember working on a submitted class proposal when I was an arts admin. It was a great class: good description, good price, good project. But the class samples in the photos were so unappealing. It was a class sewing undies, which I think our audience would have signed up for, but the photos were terrible. There were three samples but all made from the same materials so they looked mostly the same and the colors were odd and unflattering. The photos were dark and looked like they’d been photographed on the floor (which made me think of dirty laundry). Those photos were not communicating all the good parts of the class.

Fill the time.

One of the hardest things about the pandemic shutdown was that I got a “sorry your class/event has been cancelled” email about once a week for months. I felt like I had been slowly crushed. The thing I learned from that was to not let my brain get into a cycle of “I was supposed to be teaching a class right now, but it got cancelled and I am a failure.” And the way to do that was to fill that time I had set aside to teach the class with something good. Over the pandemic, I illustrated a children’s book in all of my newly free time.

Since I was supposed to be teaching tonight, I am instead going to try out a new recipe for grilled paneer with a mint and cilantro sauce. I’ve never made it before so that will be a fun project because I love to cook. A few weeks ago another class was cancelled and I used that day instead to play with a new design and it turned into a new pattern for my Etsy shop; something that wasn’t on my planned goals for the year. It feels like an awesome bonus instead of something discouraging.

11 March, 2025

International Art & Found Day 2025

2025-03-11T11:01:26-05:00An Artist's Life, Freebies & Patterns|2 Comments

One of my goals for my business this year was to “Bring more joy.” and tomorrow’s project is going to do exactly that. I am participating in International Art & Found Day, a day when thousands of artworks from artists all over the world will be placed within their local communities for neighboring residents to find. #artandfoundday

I found out about this from a follow artist friend and it happens to land on my Dad’s birthday. What better way to celebrate (since my dad is also an artist) than to share some art out in the world. And when I read the history of the project, the reason that the founder chose March 12 is because it was her dad’s birthday too.

The idea is that artists package up any kind of art and put it out in the world for others to find. Tomorrow is supposed to be pretty nice weather, so I am going to take a walk and put things in my neighborhood. I will be sharing photos on my Instagram, kind of like a scavenger hunt.

According to the website right now, there are 1600+ artists participating from 47 different countries. That link will let you check the map and see if there is some art happening near you. If not, I am ALSO going to hide a couple of photos on my website for a virtual art drop on Wednesday March 12. If you find one of those photos and email me a screen shot I will send you an art drop surprise.

What art am I going to share? I always make a sample along with my students when I teach a class so I have all kinds of cute felt animals: frogs, sheep, toucans, cats, dogs. I have more samples than I will ever need so I am really excited to share these and send them off to new homes.

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