hand made earring from Michon Designs

I feel like I’ve known today’s featured mom for a long time but really we’ve only interacted online.  Leah has a wonderful blog and is active on twitter in addition to her handmade jewelry shop.  She’s been a sincere and engaging personality and I’m so pleased that our paths have crossed.  I decided to showcase her today so that you can get to know her too!

H: How long have you been doing what you do?

L: I’ve been making jewelry since high school, but the techniques I use and my style have both changed significantly over time.

H: What do you like to create?

L: I make jewelry – I’m probably most known for my silver and pearl jewelry but I also work with copper, gold fill, gemstones, resin, found objects, glass, and really anything small and sturdy enough to become part of a piece of jewelry. At the moment I am focused on working with metal and developing my skills in that area. I love drilling, hammering, and using my torch, especially when it results in something beautiful.

H: How did you get started?  Are you finding success?

L: As I mentioned before, I’ve been making jewelry for a long time. I started selling my jewelry when it went from being a fun hobby to a very expensive and time consuming hobby.

When I started my business, I had no idea what to expect. I had no business experience and no real plan for how I was going to get sales. That was several years ago, and in that time, I’ve learned a lot about business and marketing. It’s a lot harder to run a jewelry business than it is to make beautiful jewelry, at least for me.

I feel like I’m just starting to become successful. In the last year, I’ve been selling my work fairly consistently at two galleries, and I’ve begun selling on etsy. Online sales are really tough for me, but I’m gradually starting to get more consistent sales as my photographs improve and I get my name out there.

H:Were you creative before you had children?

L: Yes, I’ve always been creative. However, becoming a mom has really cemented in my mind that I want to make my living creatively. I don’t think I took my business quite as seriously before my son was born, because it wasn’t so important to me to be able to stay at home. Now I really want a home-based job so that I can be a full time mom. Not that I get anything done while he’s awake, of course! I’m more productive with the time I do have, but I definitely have less time to work than I used to. I kind of wonder sometimes what I used to do with all my time before I had a baby!

H: Have your methods changed?

L: Absolutely – when I decided I wanted to have a baby, I knew that I wanted to make sure I wasn’t doing things that could damage my unborn child. A lot of toxic chemicals are commonly used in making jewelry, but I’ve developed methods of working that avoid almost all of those chemicals. I’m also more careful about ventilation and safety equipment than I used to be. And I have to clean up everything, every single time I use it, because otherwise my son will get into all of my tools and supplies – besides that being dangerous for him, I’d never be able to find anything once he got his hands on it!

H: How do you find time to stay creative?

L: The first few months after my son was born, I really didn’t. I took maternity leave! Gradually, I’ve started finding a few minutes here and there to work on my jewelry, and my parents watch him about once a week so I can have a few uninterrupted hours. First thing in the morning and at night I usually work on my blog and edit photos, which is also creative, but something I can do sitting down without getting all my tools out.

I’ve also learned to work more efficiently – when my husband is home and entertaining our son, I’ll sneak outside and make a whole bunch of head pins, for example, or if the baby is napping, I might make a bunch of earwires. It’s a lot faster to make multiples than just a couple at a time, and that way I have everything I need to finish a piece, rather than having to make everything from scratch when inspiration strikes.

H: Do your kids show any creative spirit?

L: I think so. It’s hard to tell with a baby (he’s not quite a year old as I’m answering these questions) so we haven’t been able to try much in terms of art projects, but he loves music and dancing, and he loves to look at art. My husband is an artist, and our son is obsessed with a set of small abstract paintings he did – he points for me to carry him over to where they are hung and he takes them off the wall to look at them and feel the texture of the paint.

H: What have you learned after having your kids (in relation to your art)

L: One thing I learned is that next time I’m pregnant, I need to be productive and make sure my galleries and my online shop are fully stocked – I had a tough recovery after giving birth, and if that happens again, I want to be prepared for not being able to do much physically for several weeks. Also, I want to be prepared to not really be interested in designing anything in the beginning – I don’t feel creative when I’m tired and distracted, so besides being super busy, those first few months, functioning on little sleep, I just wasn’t interested in making anything. Luckily, as soon as my son started sleeping more at night, my desire to create came back, and now if I have free time, I’m either working on making new things, taking photographs, or trying to catch up on business stuff. I feel really lucky that I’m able to spend the majority of my time doing the two things that are most important to me: being a mom and being a jewelry designer. Sometimes the mom stuff is just more important than the jewelry designer stuff, and that’s how it should be. I have the rest of my life to work on building my business and growing as a designer and artist, but if I’m not around for my son’s childhood I can never get that time back.

Thanks so much for visiting and telling your story Leah!  I have a pair of earrings from Leah’s etsy shop and they are among my favorites.  Simple pearl drops, great for everyday…or special days too.  Plus her stuff is super affordable…you can treat yourself! Go check out her work at http://michon.etsy.com or on her website: http://www.michondesign.com/

And don’t forget to take a peek at her blog too! http://www.michondesign.com/jewelry-blog/

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1. Featured Mom – Traci of Midori Jewelry

The Blog Meme for Creative Moms

“I suspect that every writer
is secretly writing for someone.”

Brewster Ghiselin

Obviously, this could translate to any medium. So who do you create for?

Do you agree with this statement?

Personally, I think that every artist secretly creates for themselves. To express themselves. To share themselves. To challenge and know themselves. I do lots of things for other people but there are only a few things I do solely for me. Indulging in my creativity is one of them.

If you’ve written about creativity this week, please share your link below. I’d love to see what you’ve been up to!

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H: How long have you been doing what you do?

I’ve always loved creating art. When I was eight years old my art teacher submitted a drawing I’d done of a monkey to a competition and that drawing was displayed at the Government Center in downtown Minneapolis. I remember the feeling of disbelief that my teacher had chosen my picture since I’d just been having fun with it. I also remember being mad because I hadn’t had time to finish it in class and had to hurry to fill in a background (flowers and grass) and was so disappointed that the background seemed disjointed from the monkey itself. (Not that I had the vocabulary to describe my feelings like that at the time.) Though I’ve always loved to draw, that memory sticks out as being sort of the beginning for me.

I taught myself how to paint in 2001 when my husband, who was probably tired of me saying I wanted to learn how to paint but was intimidated by colors and how they should work together, bought me all I needed to get started. It took me several years to figure out how to just let myself have fun and enjoy painting without having to burden my works with meaning. I started developing my style after copying an album cover from a Los Super Seven CD. The art was taken from an artist out of Los Angeles named Patssi Valdez, whose paintings just seemed magical to me. I copied her painting the best I could and when I finished it I really liked what I had done. Best of all, it had been fun! So, I started looking at her other works – whatever I could find online – and played around with creating my own style by trying to incorporate the same elements of whimsy and storytelling that Ms. Valdez uses. After all these years, I finally feel like I’m starting to hit a decent stride. I began showing my works about a year ago and have met with some success, selling quite a few of my paintings and even gaining some commissions. I actually sold too many paintings by the end of the year and now need to build my collection again before I can seek out more venues to display my works.

H: What do you like to create?

I focus mostly on my paintings, which are done on canvas with acrylics. I love the idea of a story in my paintings – but one that isn’t obvious. The audience must create their own back-stories to my works. I have met a few people who’ve asked me to “explain art” to them. I have such a hard time with that since I really feel that art is what you think it is. I like the idea of having elements of a potential story in my paintings, but those looking at my paintings have to connect the dots and make up the rest of the story around what I’ve supplied. I feel like all of art should be like that. Some people seem to think that art needs to have one right way of interpretation, but isn’t art all about the thoughts and feelings it provokes in others? I guess in a way I like to help foster the imaginations of others.

I also get excited about new types of arts and crafts quite easily. I am currently taking a class on block printing and hope to play around with the medium a lot this year in the hopes of making small prints or cards to sell. I also do putsy little art projects, like painting frames on mirrors or painting on wooden boxes to give as gifts. . While I’m not incredibly good at it, I also enjoy knitting and finding neat yarn combinations to play with. I’m not good at the math involved in doing fancy stitches, so I play with texture and color instead. In the past I’ve done repujado, a sort of imprinting on thick pieces of aluminum that can then be glued onto whatever object you’d like, as taught to me by my husband’s cousins in Mexico. It’s very labor intensive, however, and my hands would cramp up after a while, so I haven’t done it in a while. I also enjoy playing with Fimo clay and making little animals that I give as gifts.

H: Were you creative before you had children?

Yes, but it wasn’t my focus before having children. I worked in public relations before we had our son in 2005. I had complications with my pregnancy and had to stay home for the majority of my third trimester, but before that I knew my heart wasn’t with my job and I was looking for something else to do. I had been painting for a while and at that point I had just started to work out my style but wouldn’t admit that I was an artist. “Who ever says they’re an artist?” I would ask myself – it seemed like such a lofty title. When we decided I would be a stay-at-home mom I also decided to use this as an opportunity to get more serious about my art and really make an effort to not just create, but also show and sell my work and flourish as an artist.

H: Have your methods changed?

Oh yes!!! It used to take me months to complete a single piece because I would agonize over every stroke and every color and I just wasn’t too serious about it. Once I had kids I became much more efficient with what little time I had to paint. I plan my paintings out more beforehand and I don’t allow myself to over think my paintings as much anymore. I’ve become braver in my color pallet and I think I just appreciate my creative time more. I do my other little artsy projects while the kids do coloring or other art projects next to me at the dining table, but I have to paint on my own. I don’t like painting when my kids are around because they think it’s ok to climb on me and I get nervous about an arm slip or something while they’re close by.

H: How do you find time to stay creative?

Now that my kids are a little older (my son is just shy of 3 ½ and my daughter will be 2 at the end of March) they are able to play by themselves a bit more and I can do a little here and there. I also have a friend who watches my kids once a week to give me a few hours of dedicated painting time. Once in a while if I’m working on something that I just need to get done I am able to have either my husband or my neighbor girl watch my kids while I paint for a couple of hours. I’ve just had to become creative in finding creative time for myself.
H: Do your kids show any creative spirit?

Both of my children have a wonderful imagination, which is part of being a kid, but I’m amazed at how they express themselves. My oldest just started to draw people and I’ll ask him what the person’s name is and he’ll tell me, so I write it on the paper, and then he goes into the whole back story of who this person is and that he has a lot teeth and a hat and sleeps in the sand and scares people, or whatever it happens to be for that person. I’ve started writing down these stories for him on his pictures too, because I think it’s so amazing that these little people have such a huge capacity for story. My youngest will sit in her chair and color with such detailed swirls and lines. Her nose is practically on her paper and she’s 100% focused on that drawing at that time. I love to just watch her draw. She’s in her own little world and completely content.

H: What have you learned after having your kids (in relation to your art)

Since having kids, I’ve learned to be more forgiving, less perfect, and more present with my art. I’ve learned to own it. To accept that I am an artist and let myself be happy with it. I just hope that one day they will look at me and respect me for trying to do what I love.

Visit Heather’s site and browse her work at HeatherGarcia.net

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