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, and i loved the idea of my designs getting slapped up in public spaces as well as on car bumpers, laptops and water bottles. 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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