This Holiday Season Remember the Artists And The Designers We Are ONE and The Same

Once upon a time I was in galleries and craft shops.  I enjoyed extra cash and free time for crafts and spend evry waking hour working on them.  I taught myself how to bead and make assorted jewelry, I learned soy candle making I crocheted and I painted on canvas.  Now you might think I hide behind my computer screen and make less fanciful items.  The designs have soul too.  The quality of use as any candle or necklace.  Its just cheaper.  The truth is crafting is an expensive up front investment and they may not sell.  You make what you love and hope something takes off.  For me it never did and when the money ran out I found solace in having an unlimited canvas and paints in a wacom tablet and pen and an ipad with big storage.  Unlimited.  I could draw a thousand images and keep them for no cost.  The jewelry was 20-50$ worth of beads a piece and hours of work.  The crochet goods are a nice relaxing break but I found buying yarn addictive.  I did sell a few scarves and one christmas nearly went blind crocheting scarves and hats for the fam.  The candles were the most fun.  But thats a 500$ investment to make a big batch if you count scents, colors, pounds of wax and molds.  I moved and lost my space.  No more molds or jars in my storage of things.  They only made about 40$ in sales a month at the craft store I had a shelf at in Madison when I had my first single woman apartment.  We do it because we are drawn to make things, a thousand things we couldn't keep or use ourselves and are selling to see if we can earn what we need from it.  Some do.  Some are gloriously blessed with business savvy.  I make grocery money with my print on demand art and I stay busy but I long for the extra cash that would let me make that batch of candles too.  I have time for both.  I can straddle the world of the digital and the tactile arts.  Its a dream.  Buying canvas and paints again sounds almost horrid if it weren't so fun to actually move the brush acrossed the bumpy texture and see its watery trail.  We designers are not the fallen.  Some of us have many talents and some of us have many struggles that our talents help to negate.  Mine are the intrusion of delusional thoughts and auditory hallucinations.  I don't have them while I work and when I am successful they are even less of a threat.  We all deal with different fears in the arts, but this holiday season remember the designers are sometimes the artists and the artists are the designers.  We are all sharing a part of our thought world with a public paying for an illusionists' performance.  Some of my work from about ten years ago and further.