An Artist’s Life

14 August, 2019

Learning New Things (e fare limonata)

beckarahn2019-08-14T11:13:16-05:00An Artist's Life|Comments Off on Learning New Things (e fare limonata)

I spend a lot of time applying for things: grants, scholarships, projects, exhibitions, sales, training sessions, residencies. As an independent artist, I don’t work unless I find the opportunities, so I am always on the look out for something. About half the time (at least) you apply and get a “no thank you”. That’s pretty much expected.

This summer, I had a lot of “no thank yous” that all happened at once. It’s not anything that I am failing at, it just happened that the things I was proposing and the things that appealed to the grantors/jurors/evaluators weren’t on the same page. Evaluation panels are funny that way and really change with the personality of the people sitting on the panel and what fires up their excitement and enthusiasm.

I try not to overbook myself by applying to too many things that overlap, because you never know when you will have the opposite problem – a whole lot of YES – and there is only one of me to go around. So that meant that I had a whole lot of time on my hands this summer set aside for projects that weren’t going to happen.

So I decided to learn something new.

I started by brushing up my origami skills. This is related to one of the things-i-applied-to-but-didn’t-get. I subscribed to a YouTube channel of a designer I like who writes great tutorials and I practiced. I’ve talked about my long love of origami before on the blog, but I don’t practice enough. So I’m trying to fold something new at least once a week and trying to memorize a few simple ones.

Next, I decided to learn Italian. A friend had been talking about the app DuoLingo and I thought I’d give it a try. It’s actually a lot of fun. I’ve always been pretty good at picking up languages and it’s not often anymore that I have something that is completely new to learn. Why Italian? Why not? I have been to Italy once and I would like to go back. I learned French as a kid and it’s enough related that I think it makes it easier to pick up. Duolingo has LOTS of different languages you can pick from (including Klingon) and it works like a game. Sometimes I am saying things out loud, translating from one to the other, writing, reading. Some of the phrases are silly. I am still pretty beginner (I’ve made it through Basics, Phrases, Food and Animals) but it’s so nice to have something on my phone that feels productive. The lessons are super quick and so I can do one while sitting and waiting somewhere and it’s a whole lot less unpleasant than surfing Facebook some days.

Then, I decided to take some classes from the MN Center for Book Arts. Back when I worked as an arts admin, we collaborated with MCBA on all kinds of things, but I had never taken a class or participated in anything they do. Wow, have I been missing out. MCBA does all kinds of things with paper – papermaking, book binding, surface design on paper, printing. I love paper. I’ve never done any of these techniques. I didn’t study art except for a couple of “Art for Elementary School Teachers” required classes in college that were lame, so I haven’t had the opportunity or excuse.

First I took a “sampler” class where we got to do half-days in several different labs – papermaking, screenprinting, bookbinding and letterpress. A tiny taste, but fun. Then my husband and I signed up for a woodtype poster making class on a 1840s press. I ordered some woodtype from eBay just to play with. It needs to be cleaned but I have a couple of complete alphabets to play with now.

Then I did a two-day Japanese papermaking class. That was completely fascinating. I kept finding so many parallels and questions about working with the kozo (mulberry bark) fibers vs working with wool, which I have used a lot. The sheets of paper we made were very strong and thin; so translucent you can read text through them. We started from the inner bark and did all of the processing by hand – soaking and beating the fibers with a 2×4, pulling it apart, dipping the sheets. I loved every minute of it and I had an amazing instructor. I have plans to scan some of my sheets and layer them over some of my fabric designs. Can’t wait to try out those textures.

Finally, I took a paste paper class, which was a little less stellar (I had a hard time with the instructor’s teaching style/preparation) but gave me some ideas to explore at a later date. (If anyone out there knows anything about paste paper, especially the more traditional methods without acrylic paint, please DM me!)

I’ve decided to do the “Book Arts Certificate” program at MCBA, which is a required set of classes (like a grad school program) that gives you an endorsement in book arts media/techniques. It might open up some teaching or other opportunities for me. Who knows.

The biggest thrill of the summer has been that I had sort of forgotten how much fun it is to be a beginner at something and to learn something totally new. In fiber arts, I rarely find a class/workshop/retreat that I am even interested in. My skills are too advanced for the “sewing retreats” and more advanced classes are really hard to find. I get so tired of the “quick and easy” attitude that everything needs to be less work to be fun. I want to be challenged in a class. It feels good to have to think and ask questions.

What’s the last thing you learned that was totally new to you? Did you love it or find it frustrating? What do you think I should learn about next?

18 June, 2019

Intention and Expectation: Attending the Americans for the Arts Conference

beckarahn2019-06-18T09:21:25-05:00An Artist's Life, Everything Else|Comments Off on Intention and Expectation: Attending the Americans for the Arts Conference

The Americans for the Arts (AFTA) conference was held in Minneapolis this weekend. It is a national conference for art administrators primarily to get together and talk about funding, sustainability, data, evaluation, and innovation and do it in a room with other people who get it. I love being an artist, but I was really good at being an arts administrator. Art is something I have to do because it is part of who I am and I can’t not do it; being an arts admin was something I was called to do by whatever little voice in your head it is that tells you that you need to do this because you can make a difference.

I left my arts admin job about 5 years ago. It was an organization that I deeply loved, a mission I believed in and a community with a lot of untapped potential. I worked way too many hours and there were some parts of the approximately 1 million cobbled together parts of my job that I was less than wonderful at, but by and large it was a good fit. I did good work and proud of the projects and connections I got to be a part of.

But something changed. There was a transition in leadership. The board of directors decided to shift the values and culture of the organization to follow a different path. It wasn’t just “things change because of new leadership and people hate change” but a bigger organizational shift that included altering the mission statement. I’ve been on enough boards of directors to know that I don’t know the whole story about why and how that came to be, but I do know that suddenly I was part of an organization that wasn’t a good fit anymore and was moving in a direction that I wasn’t really excited about. And I didn’t have a voice in that change. So I needed to leave.

I don’t talk about this much. Mostly because it has taken me a long time to process it. On my last day, I turned in my keys, walked out to my car and sobbed in the parking lot. It was emotional and complicated and I couldn’t really articulate anything except the gut feeling that I needed to move on. I still think it was the right choice. It doesn’t make it less hard.

So what does this have to do with the AFTA conference?

This conference was really designed for arts admins. Everyone asked me “who are you with?” and looked quizzically at the big blank space on my nametag where my org name would be. It made me a little nostalgic. It’s hard to be an independent artist. This conference, like many others, had a couple of afternoons of concurrent sessions. You get the agenda and read two or three sentences and try to pick which of the five different topics to go to. This is always hit-or-miss. I’m not an arts admin anymore, so I felt a little like an odd duckling. I got a scholarship to attend this conference because I wrote an essay about making more connections as an independent artist and how I thought these sessions would be valuable to me as a board member of the orgs I serve. (Thanks McKnight Foundation!) So I picked topics that I thought were a good match for those goals.

After about 5 minutes in the first session I chose, I was sure I had made a big mistake. The presenter was charismatic, but instead of diving in to her topic, she told stories about her family and she had someone from the audience sing for us. It was a presentation outside of the box and I was a little restless. I wanted things I could write down in notes. I fiddled with my tea cup. I felt irritated when the conversation veered off into something spiritual. It wasn’t what I expected.

And then I had to shake myself. I was an an arts conference. Learning about art. Which by definition is outside the box. And should make you a little uncomfortable maybe. I was so caught up in taking notes to help me write the final report for the scholarship, that I sort of forgot that I was there to talk and think about art. This session was more like a collaborative performance with the audience than a lecture and I was totally missing it.

So I took a deep breath.

And I listened.

I couldn’t write a summary of the session for you if I tried. And I only wrote down one sentence in my notes but I ended up coming away with things I am thinking about a couple of days later.

“When you come in, leave the gate open.” That’s the quote I wrote down. Her story with this quote had a different intention perhaps, but my take was this: When you start to explore something new, invite people to come along. Leave the gate open so they can follow and explore too. It’s a way to think about inclusivity in what I do. How do I leave the gate open for the next person to come in?

The second story that she shared that stuck with me was about a gallery opening where the attendees were more focused on taking selfies with the art than being with the art. She realized that the way she was talking about the work (promoting/press releases etc) was attracting a specific kind of audience with an expectation of how both the art and the viewer should interact. And that wasn’t the community or culture she was trying to build. So she stopped sending press releases. She didn’t dig in to this idea much deeper but it got me to think about the idea of not only curating your work, but curating your audience as well. Creating the culture and community that you want to be a part of. That’s something I want to think about more.

At another session, with another captivating presenter, I was 100% in the moment until he had everyone stand up and hug three other people. I understand the message he was trying to demonstrate about connections and community but there was no way I wanted to hug a bunch of complete strangers sitting around my table. (Haven’t we learned anything about touching people without their permission?) There was no way to gracefully opt out of that assignment, it was awkward and super uncomfortable, and it certainly made me feel differently about that session.

Finally, at the closing session another presenter had us write on a piece of paper and then take it and construct a paper airplane. I don’t remember what we were supposed to write or what the message of the activity was (apologies to the presenter) because I got caught up watching the other people at my table. I folded my very favorite paper airplane right away without hesitation. I do a lot of paper art, so it was easy and I didn’t even think about it. The person to my right teased me about being too eager to throw the plane. “You did that too fast,” he said. Next person around the table made a functional plane, but he had a lot of extra creases in the paper from overthinking and re-doing. The woman across from me taught a lesson to several others so they would do it the “right” way. One or two people looked puzzled like they’d never folded a plane before. One argued about the merits of folding the wings diagonally vs horizontally. One woman folded hers quickly and quietly but looked a little like she was embarrassed to admit she knew how. I was completely fascinated to see how many ways that this random group accomplished the same basic task and their reactions to it.

What do all of these experiences have in common? I think it was all about intention and expectation.

First was a mismatch between the presenter’s intention for her session and my expectation about what it was going to be. I could have left the session being irritated and grumpy that it wasn’t what I wanted it to be, but I chose to change my expectation.

Next was about realizing that when you do things in an expected way (traditional press release) you will probably get an expected outcome (traditional attendees). If your intention is to change the way something works, you have to change the way you talk about it.

Third was an intention by the presenter to break down a barrier and make people feel included. However, the intention completely backfired by making me (and others) feel uncomfortable and dreading the expectation of more unwelcome interaction. (spoiler alert, he had us tell each other “I love you”.)

Finally, the intended message of the closing exercise ended up having a completely different meaning for me based on my own take on the process involved.

As an artist, these are awesome things to think about:

Will the participant/viewer understand what I am intending with this piece or process? How can I help them know what to expect ahead of time?
Am I communicating the outcome I want to have happen after they’ve seen/interacted with this piece?
Are the ways that I am creating or teaching putting up barriers for someone to interact with the work?
Am I open to the other ways that my work can be interpreted and what can I learn from that?

Although this was an arts conference, we didn’t talk very much about art. We talked about strategic planning and troublesome board members, HR issues and theories of change, data and consulting firms. But my takeaways from the sessions and the things I am thinking about the next week don’t have anything to do with the topics of those sessions.

It did what great art does: It made me think. I had a reaction. A mismatch of both expectation and intention, maybe, but an experience I took something away from nonetheless.

10 April, 2019

Five years at the American Craft Council show

beckarahn2019-04-09T23:04:19-05:00An Artist's Life, Everything Else|2 Comments

This year was my fifth year exhibiting at the American Craft Council Show. If you don’t know about their shows, here’s a little nutshell. The American Craft Council is located in Minneapolis (formerly in NYC) and they are an organization that promotes fine craft. They put on a conference, host lots of talks and small events, and publish two magazines that “champion handmade”. Each year (for the past 30+ years) they put together a large craft show in four different locations: Atlanta, Baltimore, St Paul and San Francisco. Each is a juried show with 200+ artists working in fiber, metal, jewelry, wood, or glass.

I started with their Hip Pop emerging artists program. That’s an image of my 2017 booth in its cardboard glory. (I actually think the cardboard popups are awesome and I think my work really popped against that kraft paper color.) Hip Pop is also a juried program but allows artists to share a booth with other emerging artists. The booth fees are lower (because of the limited space) and some of the display/lighting is included, so it is a way for new artists to try out the show and see if the audience is a good fit for their work before investing in a full both space. Once you have juried in as a Hip Pop artist, you can return to the shared booth for 3 years and then “graduate” to a full sized booth for the next two. I just completed my fifth year, so next year I will need to re-jury into the regular artist pool.

This year’s show just finished on Sunday and I was talking to someone about how it went and did I make enough to cover my costs. This is something we talk about as artists a lot. Some rough math in my head said “yes! It was a great year” but then I got curious about what the numbers said. One of the cool things about Square (in addition to it making credit cards super easy to take at shows) is that there are all kinds of reports I can pull up from the last 5 years and I can look at all of my data.

Talking with my neighbors, we all felt like Friday was a little slower than normal this year. I felt like Friday was usually my best day of the show and I think that’s pretty true.

This shows the percentage of my sales for each day. Thursday night is basically a cocktail party for the Craft Council donors; it’s always a pretty slow night for the artists. For the last three years anyway, Friday sales have been over half of my total. I think this probably tells you something about the typical audience that comes to this show; I tend to see adults with more flexible time and perhaps more disposable income. Saturday is more families and friends coming in groups. Sunday this year was more when I saw kids and some more age and gender diversity coming through. I definitely sold different kinds of items on Friday vs on Sunday.

This shows my sales for each category of item. The big difference you see here is the jump between the Hip Pop booth (2015 – 2017) and the full sized booth (2018-19). My sales nearly doubled when I went to the larger booth size. I wasn’t sure that would happen and I was pretty nervous. But so far that has worked out for me.

Loop or infinity scarves are my signature piece and I have had those at every show of the five years. They are easily my bestseller. The rectangle scarves, larger wrap scarves and skirts I have had in various forms every year, but I haven’t always had space to display very many of them. You can see the skirts especially are really variable. I didn’t sell any in 2017 (even though I had them there) but lots more in 2015 and 2018.

Miscellaneous was my catch-all category for things that I didn’t have every year. It included bow ties in 2016-2018, neckties this year, and some dresses in 2017-2018. I tried out different things to see what would work. Ties are always pretty popular. I did new neckties for the first time this year, but decided not to bring the bow ties because I didn’t have very many and I just ran out of time to restock. Dresses are a challenge because there is no good way for people to try them on; my 10×10 booth just doesn’t have enough space for a changing area.

The size of the total bar represents my total income for the year. Last year was a pretty great one. This year felt like attendance was maybe a little low (I don’t yet have official numbers, so I am not sure.) and I was in a different part of the room than I have been before. I am not sure how much of a difference that makes.

Finally, I actually got to the question of: did I break even? did I make any profit? This chart represents my total income for the show year (blue) and then all of the expenses (other colors) for the show. Materials included everything I needed to make the things that I sold at each show, plus a little extra to cover things like business cards, tags, stickers etc. Show fees included the pipe and drape and electricity for my booth. Booth cost was the fee I paid to rent my booth. Card fees was for credit card processing. I should note that this is a pretty prestigious show and the booths are not inexpensive. It takes a lot up front to be able to even participate and I want to acknowledge that. I didn’t count materials for things I haven’t sold yet. I had a lot more inventory there than I sold; you need that. It’s a big leap of faith that you will even sell enough to cover any of that.

I am pretty happy to know that every year my income exceeded my expenses. Not by a *lot* but by enough; those blue bars are all more than half. That difference is the amount I can pay myself for my time. As we were packing up, my husband asked if I thought I had made enough this year to pay for my time and I wasn’t sure. Wait, I can hear someone say. Aren’t you a business person? Shouldn’t you know all of this? Doing shows like this is only one of my sources of income, so I don’t usually break it down show-by-show but I look for balance among all of the things that I do. Sometimes I make more, sometimes I make less. It all comes out in the wash, as they say. But I was curious about this show specifically.

So I did the math. I always time myself when I am making a thing that I intend to sell. I know that zipper bags take me 7 minutes from start to finish. That’s the way I calculate my prices and it lets me know for sure whether I can accept a large order of something. I know exactly how long it’s going to take me to make 5 or 50 of them. So I figured out how long it took me to make all of the inventory I sold, plus about 8 hours of prep time getting other things ready for the show (ironing, printing tags, social media, washing tablecloths, running to get change), plus all of the hours I worked the show from load in to tear down. And I made $10.95 per hour.

To be honest, that’s actually more than I thought it would be. I am pretty excited about that. No, I am not going to retire on that kind of income, but even a smallish success is success! I know it’s more than I made from my first summer job.

There’s also the potential things that always come out of spending a weekend surrounded by my work and talking to people about it. I was asked to teach at a new venue. I had a possible wholesale order. I gained a handful of social media followers. And when I say handful, I mean less than a dozen, seriously. For every 300 people you talk to, 3 will actually sign up for your stuff. (I get it. I don’t sign up for everyone’s mailing lists either.) But those were people who were interested enough to find me and follow. That might mean that I will see them again at the show next year.

It’s also fascinating to me to talk to people about my work. Last year I had a lot of less than encouraging comments about how I used computers and if that meant that my work “wasn’t real art” (an actual quote from a visitor) and some negative reactions to the fact that I print on a lot of polyester (for many reasons, but those are for another post). It was almost exactly the opposite this year. I had really positive comments about how I was using a computer in really cool ways and many people appreciated that poly was so much easier than silk to care for/wash/pack for travel.

I sold out of infinity scarves in this brand new “Fair Isle” design (it was a Spoonflower design challenge entry from 2018), and two perennial favorites (Waterlily Mosaic and Tweed). For the larger rectangle scarves, I sold out of “Decadent” (another recent design challenge entry), which I thought might be too bold, but it was a big hit and Tweed again in that larger size.

I was a mentor this year to a couple of Hip Pop (emerging) artists. I wanted to continue to share some of my experiences from the show by writing this post because I feel like when I was brand new and thinking about applying I had no really helpful information. I didn’t know that Thursdays were slow or that no one would sign up for my mailing list and I wasn’t sure if it was just me. I didn’t know if I could sell enough at my $40-$60 price points to even make up that booth fee. I only sold 31 items that first year. That’s not very many when you think about it, but it was enough for me.

Overall I love this show. I LOVE the artists involved. They are the most supportive, welcoming and generous group you could ever ask to be a part of. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I have had nothing but positive experiences. It is an honor to be among such talented and dedicated makers; their craftsmanship is phenomenal. It is inspiring to be in that room. I think the Hip Pop program is brilliant and I enjoyed being a part of its pilot years. I am nervous that I won’t get juried in next year. (Hip Pop graduates don’t have to re-jury their first 2 years in a full booth.) What if the jurors think that the computer makes my work “not real art”? I’ll be holding my breath waiting for that acceptance email.

4 March, 2019

Introspection can be a workout.

beckarahn2019-03-04T19:32:59-06:00An Artist's Life|Comments Off on Introspection can be a workout.

In the last week, I have had two grant applications, a scholarship application and an exhibition application all due. That’s not only a lot a writing, but that’s a lot of thinking.

I hope that some of those applications are successful and that I get to do some of those things I applied to. When you spend a whole lot of hours thinking and writing about something, you get pretty invested in it. I am excited about these projects and that makes the waiting all that much harder.

But as I was thinking about it, I really got a lot just out of the process of writing them. Explaining “your artistic vision, your body of work, and your professional goals. This section may be very similar to an artist statement, but should emphasize a self-reflection of your artistic and professional accomplishments to date, particularly as they relate to a clearly defined path towards the future” is a pretty major task, especially when you have to do it in only 4000 characters. To put it in perspective, that’s about 1 page or 500 words. This blog post is already 1120 characters when you get to the period at the end of this sentence.

I tend to use a lot of adjectives, so my personal method for writing these things is to just get it down and not pay attention to the character count on the first draft. Wil Wheaton refers to this as the “puke draft”, where you just get it all out. Gross maybe, but descriptive. Once I get it down, then I start again at the top and start cutting. I always write more than I need. My first draft of the answer to that example question was about 8200 characters. First I delete adjectives. I put in lots of “very” and “somewhat” and “really” which don’t need to be there.

The next pass is where you start having to make decisions about what is really telling the story and what is not. And that takes a lot of reflection. I had a whole section describing my artistic practice and the sometimes dysfunctional relationship I see between fiber art and technology. This is something I think a lot about and I respond to in my work often. I finally realized that even though that was something important to me, it wasn’t actually serving the narrative. The jurors weren’t going to get anything out of those sentences that would help them understand my work or my project. More importantly, the project I was proposing didn’t actually have anything to do with that theme specifically. Even though I wanted them to understand everything about what I do, the reality was that I needed to focus their lens. That was a couple hundred characters that could go away and only I would miss them.

I re-wrote my artist statement as part of this process. I pasted it in to answer that first question and realized that it took up half a page all by itself and I didn’t have room to get the rest of the answer in there. I rewrite my artist statement about once a year, although I am not sure that is really planned. A year seems to be about the amount of time that goes by before I read it one day and suddenly think “That’s dumb, that’s not what I do at all.” I reworked this one just a few months ago for another application, but now it was too long. So I had to look at it critically once more and figure out how to distill it down into 4 sentences instead of 16. Artist statements are hard. That’s a whole other post. But I will say that I hired my friend Judi, who is a professional writer, to work on mine with me a few years ago and it was super valuable to have totally fresh eyes on it. I have changed it since then, but it was eye-opening to watch someone else take my words and present them back to me in a new way.

I worked for a bunch of years as an arts admin. I know a lot of artists who love to make art, but really don’t like to talk about it. And I know gallery-type people who think that work should “speak for itself” and not have anything written to go with it. I have to disagree. I think I learn the most about my own work when I have to talk about it and most importantly explain it to an audience who don’t know anything at all about what I do. For this particular grant application, the jurors won’t even see photos of my work unless I make it to the semi-finals. So my words have to tell the whole story.

I got the applications done, I turned them in and I feel good. It forced me to make a plan for the near future. I had to let go of some stuff that wasn’t serving the narrative. I had to distill it down into only what was important and say why it was important. I had to be positive and proactive. You have to sell yourself in a grant or scholarship application. It’s like a job interview; you have to make sure you leave the impression that they would be a fool not to hire you. And it had a deadline so I had to get it done.

I probably won’t get all of these things I applied to. That’s how it works. But I feel like I already got a little payoff from just doing the work. I tell my students that I feel the same way about participating in Spoonflower’s weekly design challenge. It makes me do the work and meet the deadline. I’ve never hit the top ten or won a prize, but do I have a huge body of diverse work that I wouldn’t otherwise. I rarely suffer from a lack of motivation; I am always working on something. But the challenges make me do the hard work of designing things out of my comfort zone and using themes that I don’t find personally inspiring. I feel kind of the same thing about my rowing machine. I don’t like doing the workout, but it’s good for me and it makes me feel good.

26 November, 2018

No Bah-Humbugs here.

beckarahn2018-11-26T11:00:46-06:00An Artist's Life, Gallery Exhibitions|Comments Off on No Bah-Humbugs here.

One of the most fun partnerships I work on is designing pieces for the Guthrie Theater Store. Last year I did a whole series inspired by Sunday in the Park with George. I have made designs inspired by the Guthrie itself. The photo above shows one of those Guthrie-inspired designs in an ad in the program and one featuring some new designs in another program.

This year they asked me to do designs for their annual production of A Christmas Carol. I know the story, but I hadn’t seen their production, so they sent me photos from last year’s production. Such fun to study all of the details and colors! Several themes or scenes jumped out at me right away:

Time is a big element in the story and there are clocks prominent in several of the scenes.
In a number of scenes I noticed actors writing with white feather pens.
In one scene of people singing carols around a piano I noticed the wine glasses lined up on the piano.
Bright streetlamps and a tiny bit of snow.

We decided to go for something that was “seasonal” without being holiday specific, so I chose rich vintage-inspired colors and bigger ideas from the story. All of the designs are made from cut paper illustrations using recycled paper.

I started with a design I called Timeless. It is made up of pocketwatches and watch chains. The colors are all soft twilight shades. The chains are also an echo of the chains on the “Ghost of Christmas Past” from the show. The papers I used for this illustration were primarily colored art paper, but “grunged up” with some alcohol ink spray to give them a more weathered texture. The background of the design is a scanned piece of hand-marbled paper, which is also a visual theme I used throughout.

Next, I designed Quills. Quills refers to the feather quill pens you see throughout the show, but is also a little nod to Charles Dickens, the author. The pens and inkwells are all made from recycled paper from vintage issues of Hennepin History Magazine. Hennepin History Museum last year gave away copies from the 50s-80s that were excess in their collection. I also gave these some texture with alcohol ink spatters and a little wash of paint to obscure the text a little bit. I cut the feathers on the diagonal, so the lines of the text on the pages gave the texture to the feathers. The background of this design is a piece of marbled fabric I made and scanned. I chose marbling because that is very often used as the endpapers in old books and I felt like it was a nice fit with my writing theme.

Mistletoe and Forget-Me-Nots started as just a little zipper bag. But Kay (the shop manager) and I decided that we liked it so well that I went back and reworked it into a repeating pattern at two different scales, so that I could make bow ties and larger zipper bags as well. In the Victorian “language of flowers” mistletoe and forget-me-nots symbolize fond memories and a connection that lasts through time, which are strong themes in the story. This illustration is all cut paper overlaid with snow made from spattered paint.

We also wanted a couple of tea towels because those make great gifts, so I pulled two quotes from A Christmas Carol that I thought were great messages for gifts you might want to give. Singing Carols and Lamplight are the two tea towel designs.

The piano keyboard is all made from more history museum magazines and the pattern from the inside of a security envelope (like the kind you get bank statements in). The wine glasses are made from tracing paper, so they had some translucency. The snow is more paint spatter. The woodgrain on the piano is more marbled paper.

It is really fun and exciting to put together a collection like this based on a theme, especially when you have such a rich story to draw from. All of these designs are available exclusively at the Guthrie Shop for the holiday season, both in the theater shop and in their online shop. The collection includes three sizes of zipper bags (velvet), clutch purses (velvet), neckties and bow ties (twill and crepe), and tea towels (linen-cotton).

5 October, 2018

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics (or putting your stats in context)

beckarahn2018-10-07T22:35:19-05:00An Artist's Life|7 Comments

Yes, I know that the title of this blog post is not going to get me any Google ranking or search engine traffic. I went to that webinar.

But people search for things like tutorials on “can I dye a towel with food coloring?” and “reviews of babylock sewing machines”. (The answers are “no” and “Mine was a lemon” if you got here from Google. Welcome.) So I am not sure that search engine optimization is what this post really needs.

I was looking at stats and search terms the other day. Everything gives you stats now, whether you want them or not. How many people like your post? How many people visit your page? How many people engage with your photo? I am not sure what I was looking for really, but I noticed that everything is down right now compared to last year. Etsy shop sales are down 22%. My blog viewership is down 25%. I posted a picture on instagram and Facebook yesterday of a piece of mine that I am really proud of and only 42 people have so far reacted to it. (About 4% of my audience at those two venues) The thing I shared about someone else’s machine knitted star map has more than double that. My newsletter subscribers have remained pretty steady, but it’s still only about 49% of subscribers that even open the email I send. I didn’t even send one out in August. That makes a real dent in your stats. Sigh.

And then I was reading a post in a forum about marketing and market testing to your Facebook followers. It’s a craft business group I belong to and often it has great questions and advice from members. Someone asked a question about using Facebook groups and the only people who chimed in responded with stories about how it was so easy to just market directly to their 12,000 or 18,000 member Facebook group followers and make XYZ happen. “A breeze” “So manageable” “Low effort”. I almost just quit the group right then. I am sure it is easy to market something when you have an audience of 18,000. I have 500. That’s not just unrelatable; that’s a different planet.

(Edited to add: I wanted to add a comment here and say how much I love all of my FB, IG and newsletter communities. You all comment and respond to my newsletter emails and I get to have real conversations with you. I LOVE THAT. I don’t have fake followers, I have real wonderful interesting people who talk to me and ask questions. I just want to keep making sure that people like you are finding and connecting with me.)

I am not looking for pity party or a pep talk, don’t worry. I’m writing about all of this because I know far more artists and I teach so many beginner classes to people whose stats look a whole lot more like mine than they do the “experts” that were chiming in on that Facebook post. And nobody talks to that group; the group you and I belong to. I spent part of the summer trying to take some classes. I don’t have a boss to send me to professional development workshops, so I sent myself. I did a couple of webinars about search engine optimization. I worked through a whole facebook/instagram advertising tutorial (oh my gosh that is complicated). I learned some new things about Google Analytics. I joined a weekly SEO seminar. The problem with all of these is that they were either aimed at total beginners (ie I just started my Instagram account 5 minutes ago) or they talked about all of the cool things you can do when you have 1,000 or 10,000 followers on XYZ platform. I am in neither of those groups.

At first I looked at those stats and thought, I am totally failing. How is everything down when I am doing all the things?! Why can I not get to the magic numbers that unlock the cool stuff like the people on that forum?

That’s the problem with statistics. All of the numbers. None of the context.

After I felt sorry for myself, I stepped back and looked at the stats a little more. Surely I could find some useful information here. They always provide nice charts and I can see where the line dipped down: May.

A few things happened in May. I joined the executive committee of a board of directors for a non-profit. I was already on the executive committee of another board of directors. Some things happened. The who, what and why of those isn’t important to this discussion. But the me part of it is very relevant. Because I suddenly found myself with two other part-time jobs without really acknowledging that to myself. Sometimes that’s what happens with volunteer gigs. I had a lot of new meetings and new things to read and research. I had things to think about and things that made me frustrated and distracted. I was doing a lot of work. Just somewhere else.

I don’t have anything bad to say about either of these groups. On the contrary. I would only do the kind of work that I do for them because I love the organizations and I believe that non-profit staff and public school teachers have the hardest working and most under recognized staff members in the business. I will do anything I can to support them because that’s my way of giving back. I’m not good at lobbying or protesting, but I am good at this.

“That’s how we’re gonna win. Not fighting what we hate, saving what we love.” — Rose Tico, The Last Jedi

So when I thought about those stats a little more, I realized that I was lying to myself a little bit. I was still doing all the stuff. I just wasn’t doing all the stuff the way I thought I was.

I was still publishing blog posts this year, but I have only posted about 20. Last year was double that. On Instagram I was posting about once a day at the beginning of the year, and now it’s about twice a week. On a good week. Maybe. Facebook is just mystifying. Yesterday it told me that my post had 0 views and 0 engagements but 8 people had liked the post (which means that they both saw and engaged with it). So I am not even sure what to make of that information (or any of the historical data). I am actually being really consistent about posting my Spoonflower design challenge entries (I have participated for 38 weeks in a row so far this year), but there isn’t a lot of variety in those posts. If you aren’t interested in those, there isn’t a lot else for you showing up in my feed. I posted a few more updates and renewals and new stuff every month in my Etsy shop last year. Long story short was that last year I was doing it too, just more of it.

So here is my lesson for you, those of us not in the 10,000 Followers Club. Consistency is important for momentum.

I can see the stats drop off when I know, due to other circumstances in my life, that I was busy and not able to put the attention in to these platforms. The audience that I was building has wandered away a little bit. And I can see it in the numbers. It makes me feel a little better to put some context to those numbers. My views are down because there was substantially less to view. I can wrap my head around that.

So what to do about that? I think understanding and taking some time to think about it is the important part. I am not able to keep up right now with where I want to be. Maybe I need to change some priorities or set some boundaries. I’ve been thinking about limiting some of those volunteer things to just 1 day a week as much as possible. Maybe I just needed a reminder. Hey, you wanted to do this and it’s important to you so don’t put it off. I don’t know the answer yet. But at least I have a better idea of the problem I want to solve. Maybe I need to start just capturing some statistics of my own. How many hours a day am I spending doing this volunteer stuff? Today it was about 4 1/2 hours. Which is why I am posting this at 8:30 pm on a Friday night. Which I am pretty sure that webinar said was the least ideal time to post something. (You can’t win them all.)