Past Life

So, I was visiting How About Orange  the other day, and was inspired to share some of my artwork from what seems like a lifetime ago.  Believe it or not, I used to be a painter/illustrator.  It’s what I went to school for, although I don’t think my talent ever reached anywhere near her’s… but if you check out her blog, you’ll see she’s in a whole other league as far as talent/success goes.  So jealous!  But so inspiring 🙂 

Anyway, I couldn’t find anything from my high school days or earlier– must’ve shipped that stuff off to MOBA some time ago… so I guess I’ll have to start with the college years, which isn’t quite as pathetic humorous as the earlier stuff, but hey, it’s whats I gots…

This is still one of my favorite projects from college– it was for a hypothetical coffee table book entitled, “Up in the Sky”.  There were size & layout restrictions, but other than that, the content was completely wide open for interpretation.  Yeah, “WTF” was the general consensus, but I still like it…

 

Sorry, poor photo quality here… I think this was supposed to be a poster for a book/story/play? entitled, “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”…. I can’t remember anything about it, other than it somehow involved a melancholy polar bear and the wind.  I really wanted a pale, simple background with foreground features that stuck out… I also wanted the shape of the polar bear to mimic the shape of the mountains– I guess I thought that was somehow clever…

 

Umm… “g” is for tomato?  What?!?  No, I didn’t smoke pot in college.  I used to love to get caught up in all that fussy rendering…  reflective of some deep-rooted control issues, no doubt…

 

After college, I farted around with a couple of different jobs, waitressing, one at a gallery, one at PAFA (oh, they just LOVED all my fussy realism…. snobs.  Seriously, though, I still loved working there… ) before I decided to form The Painted Tree, where I, well… painted on trees:

These are all 2″- 3″ square tiles- tiny-  that are mounted in a frame behind glass, hence, the bad pics again– I was too lazy to remove them from their frames before photographing.  I used recycled wood from my karate school.  I gave up this biz in 2001 due to lack of money and the sawdust was making me sick…

How did I end up sewing, you might ask?  Good question– it’s amazing how a life can change so much in a relatively short amount of time.  I used to make little painted & woodburned decorative boxes for The Painted Tree as well.  They actually sold a lot more than the tiles did, and they were all lined with pretty fabric.  I found that I really enjoyed picking out the fabrics for the interiors.  I still had a stash left over when, in 2003, while preggers with Max, the desire just sort of came to me to start sewing with it.  My mom had given me a sewing machine one year, thinking I could use it for The Painted Tree, and it had sat, since then, untouched (well, there was that one disaster hemming Bill’s pants, but we won’t go there).    Slowly I started making curtains for the house, and small gifts for people (and a quilt!) and I just became hooked.

As fate would have it, when we lived in Florida, my neighbor, who worked for an interior decorator, fed my fabric obsession by bringing over countless discontinued and duplicate samples of decorator fabric, and so I ended up with an incredibly giganto fabric collection (not that that has ever stopped me from buying more). 

So here I am, married, two kids, a bedroom-sized fabric collection, and a small little label called gigglepotamus.  I got my invitation to join Spoonflower the other day, which is running a beta program for artists/crafters to design & print your own fabric. I totally thought I’d be on the list for at least a month or so before I got my invite… I’m so excited at the prospects, but I’m completely stalled out because my circa 1996 Adobe Illustrator skills aren’t exactly going to help me with the design process nowadays… if anyone has any suggestions for any cheap/free & user-friendly software programs, where I can create graphics in a tile/repeat, please! I am open to any suggestions/help you might offer!!  I am totally shamed by this, as *technically* my degree says Graphic Design on it…. shame, shame, shame….