in 2010, multiple things happened in my life at the same time. my personal life blew up and i went through a major breakup, so i had to moved out and on my own. i was burnt out on the crafty biz and didn’t really have a job. and dog walking fell into my lap, starting as a side hustle but quickly turning into my full time gig. it was exciting and also exhausting, but i chose to focus on it. for the first year or two i considered myself “on hiatus” from artmaking, though i was still making stuff sporadically. but i bowed out of the craft mafia and the constant hustle of selling my wares in favor of building my pet biz. i needed some financial stability and the pet biz seemed more likely to provide that.
before all this, as a natural outgrowth of my fascination with stencils, i had begun making little stencil signs that were mixed media (think lots of bottle caps) and some that were more like paintings. as time went on, i tried my hand at doing some stencil paintings featuring some of my heroes, like frida kahlo and rachel maddow, as well as a bunch of my cat named sticker. music and new orleans themes were also explored.
(Those last two paintings are a funny story in that they were not something I was particularly proud of or happy with but they ended up on a tv show set!)
looking back through my photos, i guess this could also be called the t-shirt and sticker era. making designs for stickers that could easily be turned into tshirts – or the other way around – became the easy thing i could still do while holding down the pet job. events of the world were also pushing me to respond via my creativity. i was still sometimes diy printing at home on the kitchen table, but i also used print-on-demand sites like teespring when something got so popular that i couldn’t keep up with demand. sometimes designs came to life first as spray paint stenciled diy stickers. doing a short run of professionally printed stickers was a good way to test a design to see if there was interest in making it a tshirt.
i’d be remiss if i didn’t mention the michigan womyn’s music festival as an inspiration and a place i continued the hustle of selling my wares once a year, as a way to help pay for my time in the woods volunteering as a worker. from 1996-2015 when it ended, i spent some portion of my summer from a week to 6 weeks in the woods of michigan with thousands of other women in intentional community under the guise of a music festival. so naturally my creativity was inspired to make designs that spoke to and came out of that experience.
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