Classes & Teaching – Becka Rahn, artist

30 October, 2020

This post is brought to you by me, or how affiliate links can make it harder for the rest of us

beckarahn2020-11-15T14:06:37-06:00An Artist's Life, Classes & Teaching, Everything Else|1 Comment

I got an email a few days ago asking me a question about a Spoonflower fabric. I get questions like this on a semi-regular basis with someone wanting a recommendation for a project they are working on. I am happy to chime in with my experience; I’ve used most of the fabrics for one project or another. My site is covered with Spoonflower fabric in use. But as I was writing the email answer, I thought to myself, “didn’t I already write a blog post that answered this?” It felt like deja vu. I checked and it turns out I hadn’t, but my first instinct was to just look up that post and send the person a link to it. After all, if I wrote up a post it’s probably more in depth, more detailed, more thoughtful than what I would answer writing you an email in response.

But, I was talking with another colleague and apparently there is a kerfluffle in the craft/knitting/sewing online community because a teacher responded to a question just like I was going to do: “here’s a link to a video on my website where I answer that question.” Only the problem is that the […]

23 September, 2019

Etsy Resources: A Virtual Handout with my top 10 articles to read first

beckarahn2019-09-23T12:31:21-05:00Classes & Teaching, Etsy, Tutorials, UpcomingClasses|Comments Off on Etsy Resources: A Virtual Handout with my top 10 articles to read first

I’m teaching a class today about opening an Etsy shop and I wanted to create a quick reference handout that had clickable links. That’s hard to do with a paper handout. So I decided to create it as a blog post and even if you aren’t in my class, this reference might be helpful to you as well.

I always recommend that new potential Etsy sellers take some time to read the Etsy Seller Handbook, but it can be really overwhelming to get started. It has a lot of information. So here are my 10 favorite articles to help you make decisions as you are opening up your shop and trying to decide what features to use.

Getting Started.

This beginners guide to selling on Etsy has a whole lot of links to some of the most frequently used features and is kind of like a checklist of the steps you should take to set up.
Tips for choosing your shop name.
This article on Communicating your Brand has great advice and links about creating shop policies and FAQs.

Listings.

How to add variations (color, size, style) and photos of those variations to your listings.
7 types […]

3 August, 2018

This weekend at the Bell Museum: Me!

beckarahn2018-08-03T18:39:08-05:00An Artist's Life, Classes & Teaching, Out & About|Comments Off on This weekend at the Bell Museum: Me!

I will be at the brand new Bell Museum this weekend as an artist-in-residence in their #SolutionStudio Lab. The exhibit in this space talks about how sometimes the things you need to do your work aren’t things found in stores and how artists and scientists have to sometimes make the tools that they need. I am going to talk about how I use recycled paper all the time when I make my work and then we will be making containers from recycled papers: pieces of origami art that you can use to hold things like art materials or your rock collection. I will even show you how to make a paper cup that holds water. My sister and I used to make these all the time and thought it was super fun to drink out of them. Saturday & Sunday August 4&5, 1-4 pm.

Hope to see you there!

5 February, 2018

Tutorial: Make a valentine cut-out design

beckarahn2018-02-05T13:34:56-06:00Classes & Teaching, Freebies & Patterns, Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|Comments Off on Tutorial: Make a valentine cut-out design

Since Valentines Day is just around the corner, I thought I would post a quick tutorial for making a heart shaped cut out design. You can use any image or pattern and “cut it out” to make it into a heart shape. (Or any other shape you want to use. The steps are the same.)

Make a heart

The first thing is to create your heart. I want a nice smooth shape that is basic black and white. You could use some clip art, but I really prefer to make my own “clip art”. (pun intended) With my own art, I never have to worry about using a copyrighted image or inadvertently stealing someone else’s design. I could draw something in Illustrator or use the vector tools in Photoshop, but I think it is so much easier to just start with a piece of paper. Seriously.

Why? I like the quality of the shape. Vector designs often look too perfect to me. It is really fast and easy to use the circle tool and the pen tool to create something that is symmetrical and has perfectly smooth lines, but I think that’s boring. It […]

29 January, 2018

I think I forgot to eat breakfast this morning.

beckarahn2018-01-29T18:20:05-06:00An Artist's Life, Classes & Teaching|Comments Off on I think I forgot to eat breakfast this morning.

You’d think by this point in my life that I wouldn’t miss things like this, but there it is. I was focused on a project (taking photos for some new classes) and then I had a meeting to run to and I am pretty sure I didn’t even finish my cup of tea. So then this afternoon, I was kind of scatterbrained and not very focused and suddenly I realized that all I have eaten today is a bowl of lettuce and a hard-boiled egg. That explains a lot.

Forgetting to fuel up, in the metaphorical sense, came up in a couple of conversations today. Back in the late summer, when it was time to schedule teaching gigs for this winter, I was 100% apathetic. I scheduled almost nothing. I was busy and the thought of scheduling one more thing was just completely unappealing, no matter how far away it was on the calendar or how easy it was. They were all classes I had taught before and venues where I know all of the quirks. I was so bogged down in the boring details of contracts, descriptions and logistics that it was […]

12 September, 2017

“What if nobody shows up?”

beckarahn2017-09-11T17:31:16-05:00An Artist's Life, Classes & Teaching, Everything Else|12 Comments

Last year, I got a grant from the state arts board to make some new work. Part of the requirements of the grant was to have a part of the project that the public could participate in. This could be a performance to attend, art making, a video to watch. Something that they could interact with in some way.

I chose to do a series of mini-workshops where I showed participants how to do a tiny taste of my process making the art for the exhibition that was the culmination of the grant. The workshops were well attended and I had so much fun. A friend recently did a similar series of art making workshops for another grant. She posted about her nervousness and excitement about the events and one of the commenters on that post of hers really stood out for me. The comment was something like this:

“You are so brave. I could never do an event like that, I would be too scared that nobody would show up.”

I read that comment and I thought to myself, “Oh honey. Nobody always shows up. You can count on that.”

When I say […]