The other day, I was at the back of our property with Kyle with our tiller. Above us was this pine tree we believed to be mostly dead, yet behold these little pinecones were growing, cracking open actually. The sound was this bizarre melody of crackling, like rice krispies in milk.
A year ago, I started drawing geese. The Canada goose specifically. They’re a special bird to me.
I see them everywhere – on our walks on Bailey Trail, at the pond in town, flying over our house, on the side of the road, flying over the parking lot in Erie, and hanging out in the Lemur pond at Keystone Safari. They are my comfort animal, a reminder for me that I’m not alone.
God’s used them as a reminder of His promises in my life.
This is a sketch I did to practice the posture of the goose on land. Their necks, their postures, and the way their wings look have a completely different view from land to sky to water.
I usually rush through my drawings, but today I studied the example photo before I jumped in. I also used a technique I learned as a kid to use circles to mark the lines of the body.
A tea set, one drawn from reality and one from fantasy. A picnic in my mind. Pencil and oil pastel on paper.
This teapot belonged to my grandma and I’ve always loved classic shape, delicate gold leaf lines, and romantic floral vignettes on the vessel and lid.
The tea cup and saucer, is a set inspired by flowers that I would love to own. It looks magical!
I find inspiration abundant when I am at home, my “home” home. The way my mom decorates brings me happiness! From the colors to the textures, it is a layered cake. There are some pieces that are quite old and have lived full lives before they found their way here. Others have a story, a memory attached that I think of, or a purchase memory itself, on one of our many mother-daughter outings as a kid. As I look forward to the future of decorating my own house, the warmth, and joy I feel being here is something I cherish and hope to instill into the new home we are about to settle into.
Candlesticks of glass, metal, and wood drawn in pencil and oil pastel on paper.
I finished my koala portrait from Koala Drawings in Pencil in a new medium, well a new old medium, a medium I haven’t used in 10 years, oil pastel! I forgot how good oil pastels are for color payoff and texture without being messy like chalk pastels or watercolors. I felt in control of the pigment while being able to direct shadows and highlights over the piece. I’m hooked!
This koala was inspired by a photo I found on Instagram from a creator with the handle @hidenoritsuzuki. Why was this image so special to me? The hand posture and facial expression reminded me so much of my stepdad and his favorite goofy way to feign exasperation. It was the hand! Totally brightened my day. 🙂
My go-to inspiration in high school was this daily calendar my mom had in her office. Each day featured a photograph from a scene in Ireland, and each day, at the end of the day, my mom would bring the paper home and give me the photograph to draw from. Before the days of Pinterest and Instagram, it was a bit tricky to find beautiful images to practice with. There were magazines of course and books, not to mention literally the world around you, but this was a game changer to get daily inspiration. In the 2000s, it was before the supremacy of the touchscreen smartphone with apps galore and fantastic cameras to snap photos in that you could carry around in your pocket. If you took photos for inspiration, you had to print them and it was not cheap. Printing even on printer paper was not cheap and trust me, parents did not like us wasting ink.
This is a taste of what the images featured via a modern source – Unsplash.
What is special to me about the framed image above is that I didn’t frame it. My grandparents did. It was a piece that I guess spoke to them and they framed it and hung it in their bedroom. Something I didn’t appreciate at the time, as a moody teenager I was embarrassed by it. Now in 2024, it hangs in the hallway outside my bedroom and when I see it hanging there proudly in its frame I remember how much they believed in my art, my writing, my fashion sense. I wish I could show them all that I am doing now. I think they would be proud.
I was inspired to explore my feelings about this dream and nightmare from a YouTube video I watched by Electra Dashwood. You should check it out!
This Fashion Polly-esque playset-looking trunk may look cute and fantastical, but in my dream, it was full of pure nightmares. This dream sequence was so vivid I woke feeling like my life was falling apart, all because of this Pandora’s box. Definitely the effect of some stressful personal situations I had in my life at the time. I’ve been feeling waves of anxiety lately. Although I deeply disliked this trunk in my dream, in art form I wish I had this little gem to store my fabric because it is delightfully bright and vivid. This was drawn in chalk pastel in February 2024.
This was another odd dream, with my dad, whom I don’t often dream about because I honestly don’t have that many memories with him. After a big boundary breakthrough, I had this dream in which my dad would only communicate with me through watercolor clouds expressing his emotions about what I shared. This was such a cool dream because usually all my dad and I do if we have an emotional conversation, it is in anger and yelling. But this dream was delicate and uplifting. We communicated, and I wish this dream had been real life. The clouds were recreated in chalk pastel in December 2023.
To start the path of becoming a knitwear designer, I first had to quit knitting, totally walking away from it to understand that it was something I was passionate enough to keep growing, pursue, and be willing to fail at to create something beautiful. Sometimes personal growth requires surrendering your plan to find the plan you were called to follow.
These pieces were made two years apart and yet I think they fit seamlessly together even though they were not planned. None of my knitting pieces from 2023 onward were planned because I decided to quit knitting in 2021 and was feeling pretty lost and frustrated in 2022. Knitting became a place of competition with my mom, a comparison with more advanced knitters, and a direct competitor to my sewing process.
It took a while for me to see this skill as an art form instead of a distraction. An extension of fashion design, storytelling, and fiber art. These forms are symbiotic, yet the way I was approaching it created struggle in my mind and it wasn’t until I made peace with the process that I could see how this was a way to continue self-expression and design.
It took being willing to approach knitting the way I feel comfortable instead of the way others feel comfortable, like knitting on straight needles, and taking the scenic route in my knitting technique to learn and improve. I had to accept that my pieces were going to look different because my approach was different than how I was being taught. Because of my background in art and sewing, I think about garment creation as I would in sewing. Knitting is the opposite, instead of cutting shapes out of a whole, you are making the whole shape out of nothing, it’s a brain teaser. It was at least until I took time to think about it.
After I completed the scarf, I put my needles away, donated my excess yarn stash, and walked away. For a year, I didn’t want to knit. I wasn’t inspired, I wasn’t interested. But at that time, I was designing with fabric. I was tailoring and learning how to read patterns. That’s when it clicked. All of it clicked.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t figure out knitting, I needed a better approach! My brain needed time to process the knowledge that I was learning from sewing and knitting. My mind was figuring out what kind of story it wanted to tell. Making a collection in 2022 for my family and friends got the ball rolling in my mind. I realized it wouldn’t be that difficult to be a successful knitter, I just needed to be a knitwear designer and go that extra step to create my own pattern and my own plan. Knitting hadn’t clicked before because I was trying to be like other knitters, instead of experimenting and finding my own style.
Just like personal style, creative writing, and art, you have to find your thing! The process may not feel like progress and that is where falling in love with the process is such an important piece of the puzzle. I have a passion for designing clothing, I’ve had it my whole life, but I was divorcing clothing from knitwear because I was not pushing myself to make clothing. Once I got serious and dove into making an actual garment it transformed my perspective. They are the same just different approaches. One does not need to be a distraction from the other, they can work in sync. That’s when the light bulb went off in my mind – so can accessories. Layers are little things that make a piece pop. If I am going to go all in for design, then a symbiotic relationship between what I design with thread and what I design with yarn must play off of each other. This is how I realized being a knitwear designer was as much a part of me as being a fashion designer, a sewist, an artist, and a writer.
This was a sketch from memory, of my first bunny, Midnight. She was a great listener. A companion who liked quiet, just like me. I loved watching her ears move as she perceived the world around her. This was a quick sketch directly in chalk pastel with minimal blending.
The race track of chipmunks, and the gymnasium of squirrels. Drawn in chalk pastel.
One Rabbit Riot 