This week’s guest on What's Your Story is artist and HR consultant, Jennifer Hewett. She’s a self taught artist and while she dabbles in many different mediums her main focus is printmaking. If you enjoy color, fabric, and watching an artist’s process I highly recommend you follow Jen on online (Instagram / Twitter / Facebook). She's wonderful about sharing her process. Last year she focused her efforts on a year long project of 52 weeks of printmaking - which was so inspiring to watch. This year she’s given herself a whole new challenge: creating a printed garment every month, which she calls Print, Pattern, Sew. As this podcast grows I’ve found that my focus lately is on artists and creatives who have not followed the traditional path to their creative career. They started out as one thing and eventually positioned their lives as working artists. What I love so much about Jen is her honesty around working as both an artist and an HR consultant. I think it’s so important to be transparent about having side jobs or day jobs, so we can stop upholding the starving artist trope. Jen and I talk about this, and we also talk about setting intentions for yourself down the road in your career, and always pushing oneself as an artist to grow, build skills, and make sure you're resilient in today’s ever changing work force and much, much more! A special note, Jen is offering an online class in block printing on fabric which starts this weekend. Registration for Design, Carve, Print: Block Printing on Fabric closes Wednesday, January 28, 2015 at 12pm Pacific Time. I’ve signed up for it, and I'm thrilled to learn from her. Come join us! To learn more about Jen, her work, read her blog, and follow her on social check out her website jenhewett.com.

This week, I sit down with Oakland based artist Lisa Solomon. I asked Lisa to come on the show, not just because she’s a friend, but really because Lisa’s a great example of living a creative, artistic life while working in many different disciplines. One of the original reasons for me starting this podcast was to demonstrate though the stories of others that there is no one way to make a living as a creative person. Lisa embodies that; she’s an artist, a mom, a teacher, a crafter, and more, and she leads a successful, creative life. We talk about her role as a teacher and the things she’s learned and shares with her class. We touch on success: what exactly does it mean to be successful. And we also discuss her considerable embroidery installation of 1000 doilies, Sen, and how it became possible through a community call and ultimately lead to more social practice work. Those are just some of the topics we cover today. Enjoy!

This week on What's Your Story I sit down for a long overdue chat with artist Kate MccGwire. I met Kate back when I was running my old blog, and have done written Q&A's with her, but have never interviewed her formally. We spoke this summer while she was working on her studio barge, a boat that lives on the Thames in London. Kate is an incredibly private person, and doesn't often grant interviews -- this was a special opportunity for me. If you are not familiar with Kate's work, its exceptionally prolific (if that's a possibility), she uses feathers to create otherworldly sculptures that are not only beautiful, but dark and brooding. Her work ranges is size and feather collection -- but every single one of them is unique and absolutely stunning. She's shown all over Europe and New York, and has 10 museum shows in the coming year. Kate has been working with feathers over the past 10 years, and at the moment doesn't see an ending in sight. As with all of my conversations, we cover a wide variety of topics over the next hour. Some highlights are our mutual love for pigeons, the places Kate gets her feathers from, when work takes on a life of its own, developing a second career, and the process behind her work, as well as the importance of pushing yourself to reach out to people within your industry. Because we discuss a lot of her pieces, I have posted many of them below for you to get an idea of her work. Please do check out her website. Kate is also on Twitter, and Instagram.

On this week's episode, I had the pleasure of talking with San Francisco based artist Sonya Philip. Sonya is not only an artist and maker but she’s also a clothing and pattern designer. After creating 4 items of clothing in 2012 she challenged herself to create 100 new items of clothing in a year. She went on to carry that project, which is now known as 100 acts of Sewing into 2013, and has since created her own pattern line under the same name, and is currently working on and developing a capsule wardrobe. I was especially interested to talk to Sonya about her project and her experience around 100 Acts of Sewing for 3 main reasons: 1. the act of teaching oneself a new skill that changes your life, 2. the problem of over-consumming in our society, and 3. the creative side of sewing. We cover a lot of these topics but we also discuss much more from building wardrobe consciously by supporting small businesses that make their items in the US to the importance of understanding the labor behind our clothing. Whether you are interested in sewing, conspicuous consumption, and supporting handmade and made in the USA - I think you’ll get a lot of this podcast.

This week I sit down with author, stuffed animal pattern maker, blogger, and podcaster Abby Glassenberg of While She Naps. Abby has been an online friend of mine for quite some time, but only when I moved back to Boston in 2013 did we start to get closer (Abby lives in Wellesley, which is right outside of Boston) and I'm so grateful for her friendship. She is incredibly inspiring, driven, and generous to those around her both online and off. Abby started her blog, While She Naps in 2005 as a way to document the crafts she made while she stayed at home with her first child - hence the name. Since the creation of that blog, Abby has gone on to turn a lucrative hobby into an online business. She’s written 2 books (The Artful Bird: Feathered Friends To Make and Sew and Stuffed Animals: From Concept to Construction), currently licenses her toy designs to Simplicity, regularly contributes projects to craft magazines, offers B2B ebooks, resources and tips on her blog, and hosts her very own podcast, The While She Naps Podcast. Abby also has a weekly newsletter, that I highly encourage you to sign up for if you are creating anything online. Abby is successful, humble, and someone I was really excited to chat with on the show, because she is not only genuine, but she always has a unique opinion. We cover a lot of ground in the show, some topics of note are keeping a healthy newsletter, being honest about tuning in and enjoying being online, creating blog content, and setting goals for your business and online success. As an aside, this episode is longer than most of my podcasts. I did a lot less editing - one, because Abby and I had a very smooth linear conversation, and two, I wanted to offer a little more content for those of you who are working or creating while listening so you get a little more time before you have to listen to something next. Please let me know what you think about the length. I honestly want to know if you appreciate a shorter or a longer show. Enjoy the show!