HaikuCat Creations

 With an order that I took today, a custom request for two cloudburst pieces that are essentially re-making two cloudbursts I made in the past that sold, I have officially surpassed my highest year's revenue since I opened my Etsy shop. I won't mention what that amount is because my business is still really at the hobby level, but I just wanted to make note of it because having gotten to that point when the year's still not quite to the halfway mark feels really good.  In other news, yesterday Pat, one of our kids, and I went out to the Desert National Wildlife Refuge for some nature therapy. It was over 100 degrees, but there was shade (in places) and a breeze so the heat didn't bother me as much as I thought it would. There was a lot to see and hear (Merlin told me there was a Blue Grosbeak! (birds became interesting to us when we turned 50, that's just how it goes)) and I took the time to really notice the calm, peace, and happiness in my body that was purely the...

 I've sent out a handful of orders in boxes that I upcycled by adding posca pen decorations to appropriate sized boxes I had received myself in the mail. I loved doing that and felt like I was adding a fun element for the person who had ordered my art. Not only did it give me a chance to reuse something that was essentially garbage, but it added something personal to the experience of buying some of my art. Unfortunately I don't get appropriate-sized boxes that often. My usual go-to for sending out a piece of embroidery hoop art is a bubble envelope. But I want to keep my whimsy level sustained for all of my packages, not just some. So, I decided to pre-decorate a couple of them yesterday and today. The rainbow is cute, but basic. The butterfly, though--! I'm enamored with how that turned out.  I'm going to work on creating a small stock of decorated packaging, so I have it ready for any and all sales. 

 I wanted to talk about some of my other 52 for 52s. These are the ones I didn't talk about in any previous blog posts because I was trying to keep the blog focused on art and creativity. But, a) I don't really want to limit myself like that anymore and b) watching movies, listening to music, and playing games is actually part of the creative process. It's part of the input phase. The things we experience go in and the creativity comes out. A creative person takes inspiration from all kinds of places and I don't want to discount that part of the process. So, games. We have a lot of board games. This picture shows only some of them. Another couple of shelves were cut out of the picture. This picture actually kind of sucks, but I don't like to make a blog post without a photo, so... We actually used to have more, but last year we did a challenge in which we played all of our games in alphabetical order (one game night per week, playing two each time--you can do the ma...

 At the beginning of the year, I came up with a series of challenges, all related to the fact that I was turning 52 this year and there are 52 weeks in a year. 52 for 52. I intended to create 52 things (art/crafts), read 52 books (that's actually my usual goal number each year, so not exactly out of the ordinary), take 52 photos of ordinary beauty, blog 52 times, play 52 board games, listen to 52 albums, watch 52 movies, and...um, I think that's it? No, that's not it. I also wanted to write 52,000 words of fiction by the end of the year. I have fallen behind on almost all of them. I have changed my internal rules about many of them. But, today I am determined to get back on track. There are 12 days left in June and when June is over, the year is halfway done. So, my plan is to use these 12 days to catch up on everything . Then I will get back to a more manageable weekly schedule for these things. Except, actually, the writing. It was a really low bar I was giving myself the...

  Okay! Now it's time to tell this one's story. I feel like I'm going to struggle because I'm not sure this one has as much of a story as the previous one. I don't want to go into the thinking behind every single minute decision I make on each piece, but I do want to hit the important bits.  So, I started off with the blue ribbon-wrapped hoop. A while back I went through all of my embroidery projects that weren't either on my wall or in my shop and took a bunch of embroidery art out of the hoop frames they had been in. The embroidery itself either went into a pile which I will use to create... something (I'm thinking some kind of book so that I can look back at my embroidery journey) or, (not really that) sadly, to the trash. So I ended up with a lot of hoops available for re-use. Some of them had ribbon-wrapping, some didn't. This one did and the ribbon's color went really well with some green and blue batik fabric I had recently bought.  The batik ...

 For a long time I have wanted to use this space to tell the stories behind each of my art pieces. But there wasn't much art making going on to tell the story of due to most of my time being taken up with my return to college. I have finished that now, earned my bachelor's degree, and my art-making time has increased. I have even completed a few pieces of embroidery hoop art and so I will now tell the story of this hoop, which I am calling, "The Observer." That there is me, with my art, including my face so you can see the artist behind the art, gathering up all my courage to do so because it makes me uncomfortable to put my face on the internet. Here is a better picture of the art itself. I started stitching this piece in October of 2025. The idea was that I wanted to recreate a previous digital artwork of mine in embroidery. I thought this particular piece would give me a good opportunity to practice layering several background fabrics at once. I've previously m...