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.

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

 Friedrich Nietzsche

The creative process is not controlled by a switch you can simply turn on or off; it's with you all the time.

Alvin Ailey

The thing about the creative process is it's so chaotic.

Thomas Newman

The best thing for my creative process is a deadline.

Jeff MacNally