Category: Art and Life

I missed sending out the newsletter for a couple of weeks Starting a weekly newsletter is challenging. And if you want to know more about that, read about my challenges at the end. But first… Cricut Maker 3 Last weekend I bought a Cricut Maker 3. It’s a Computer Numerically-Controlled cutting/shaping machine that fits on… Continue reading You might have noticed…

I should never Google that phrase. In many of the articles I’ve read (today’s search gave me 1,550,000,000 results) about project management, the first step is to describe the project. Well, the first-first step is to come up with the idea but then it’s a matter of describing what the project is. The plan is… Continue reading Project Planning

So what if metal is sort of like fabric? I grew up around sewing and textile crafts. As a girl of that era, I was taught handcrafts like sewing, knitting, crochet, and embroidery. I still have really awful examples of my childhood projects. Somewhere… in a box… Some 20 years later, I worked in a… Continue reading And my point is…

With all the similarities, metal and fabric do have their differences. A contrasting look at metal and cloth following up from last week. If you missed last week’s news letter, you can read my blog post about how metal and cloth are similar. I warned told you that this week I would be writing about how metal and… Continue reading Metal vs. Fabric

One of the first things I enjoyed about working with sheet metal is that I could apply the skills I already had in working with cloth fabric. How sheet metal is like fabric It’s flat. And it gets made into things that are not flat. Sheets of steel get shaped into (used to get shaped… Continue reading Starting the Deep-dive into Metal Shaping

How to create an online art business when you graduated high school before the Internet was in your pocket. I grew up in the Just-in-case learning style — you spent kindergarten through high school trying to learn everything you might need to know for the rest of your life. But I didn’t learn how to… Continue reading Just-In-Time Learning

I started going by AJ when I worked in a professional theater costume shop for the first time. There was another stitcher with the same first name and we just came up with AJ for me and it has been my “credit” name for theater, television, and now as an artist. I thought that I… Continue reading Introduction