About Me
I am a Penn grad, a liberal arts educated baby boomer with a background in visual communications. Despite starting my working life as a classroom music teacher, I am now a freelance graphic and web designer. Since my graduation from Penn I have grown my freelance design and consultancy business, through working with churches, entrepreneurs and dreamers.
When not in front of a computer I’m an NPR listening, coffee drinking, New York Times crossword-aholic. I have itchy feet and love to travel and compulsively take photos while doing so.
I’m also an ex-pat Briton, born on the coast of Norfolk, and still happiest near the waves. I am currently living just outside Philadelphia, PA, in the US.
My Story
I have made little books for as long as I can recall. I wanted to learn how to make them better, but never made the tiem to do so. Many years on I took a summer course at Burlington, VT, where I learned techniques for making more book.
Then I came across the idea of books containing pages from diferent media, but only children saw the potential in them. After more ruminating I came across the concept of junk journals. This meant I could draw together the multimedia, graphic design skills, and book making techniques into one product.
After making a few and advertising them on Facebook, I decided to sell them at craft fairs and create an online store. This site is it.
What I Do
At any given time I have many journals under way. I get a surge of enrgy to create and design pages and look for images to use, then spend days printing.
Other days I am trimming paper to make the pages the same size and constructing the journals. At other times I sorting through physical ephemera I have kept to see what would work with a given journal or theme.
At other times I actually get on and make some journals, usually as a craft fair approaches. I realize that I have too many embryonic journals in zipper bags and insufficient finished ones.
I also love to talk to customers to hear what they would like to see. From these discussions I may alter a journal or create an entirely new format. This year I made several long and skinny journals, in addition to a raft of small fold up ‘folios’. These have writing pages and small amounts of ephemera, but feel less daunting.