April Studio Recap

Rug progress, Sneak Peek Sketches, An Upcoming Show, & More!

May 01, 2025

Hello friends! Happy May! IDK about you but I’m tired of #showers and ready for #flowers!!!!! The energy of spring is already making things feel much more lively around Des Moines. I’m looking forward to lots of fun in the warm months ahead (including a handful of art markets on the books for this spring/summer!!) but in the meantime I’ve been hunkered down in the studio trying to get some work done. Want to check out what I’ve been up to???

WALK! Rug Series Progress

This series of rugs is coming along slowly but surely! I finished tufting them this month, and have been grinding away on the clean-up process.

Not gonna lie, this part is kind of kicking my ass lol 😭 Cleaning up the initial tufting is mostly done by repositioning and removing individual pieces of yarn with tweezers, which is super hard on my hands and wrists, so I’ve had to shorten working sessions and take plenty of breaks. This is also one of the more detailed designs I’ve ever done, and the fact that they’ll be combined into an animation at the end makes design accuracy more important. PLUS the fact that I’m basically doing 12 of the same rug makes it feel much much more tedious… Sorry for the rant, but this part of the process can be brutal!!! Honestly I think I’ve gone through similar painful periods with pretty much every project I’ve ever done in one way or another, and all you can do is power through and keep chipping away at it. And then once you’re finished you forget it all! Amazing how that works. I’m trying to focus on getting a bit done every day, and letting it take the time it needs to take without burning myself out. And I’m starting to see light at the end of the tunnel!!!

First pass of cleanup on the top vs no cleanup on the bottom! Definitely worth all the effort unfortunately :/

Sneak Peek Sketches

Alongside working on the current rugs, I’ve been planning out the next batch of designs I’m going to make. Here are the sketches I’ve been playing with! >:-)

I’ve been exploring the concept of “smear frames”, which is an animation technique that blends multiple states of a drawing into one frame to simulate an exaggerated motion blur effect. I think these frames on their own are really interesting and weird and cool! Here are some examples for reference if you’re curious:

Iowa Exhibited 2025 at Polk County Heritage Gallery

V excited to share that my SQUEEZE! sculptures were selected to be part of this year’s Iowa Exhibited show at the Polk County Heritage Gallery! Show opens on May 8th, and will be up through June 26. Come check it out!!

polkcountyheritagegallery

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5 Things I Loved This Month

1. Listening: Bloodless by Samia

I’ve been listening to this album in a borderline religious way since it came out… No skips, no skips

2. Eating: Cherry Chocolate Chunk Cookie Bars

Another perfect recipe from Jesse Szewczyk !

I Forgot How Good A Maraschino Cherry Can Be

3. Reading: Choosing to walk by Rayne Fisher-Quann

This essay does a great job of breaking down some of the reasons AI has taken hold of the writing world in such a big way (spoiler: capitalism!), and why there’s still value in choosing to do things the old fashioned hard way.

I think of writing a lot like walking. It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I don’t always want to do it, and it’s not always technically enjoyable; sometimes it’s boring or slow, sometimes it’s tiring and pointless, sometimes it’s cold or wet or windy and I’m retracing the same steps around my neighborhood that I’ve walked a thousand times and it sucks and I’m miserable and wish I’d stayed inside. Nonetheless, I always feel worse in my body and mind when I avoid it for too long, and it’s a loss that feels greater than just the quantifiable enumeration of calories I didn’t burn or sunlight I didn’t see. Of course, walking offers the chance of unmatched material reward: only through walking might you stumble upon a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that isn’t on Google Maps, a rich lady doing a yard sale on her stoop, a garden, a special tree, a cat, a $10 bill on the ground. But you also might get spat on by a pervert. When you choose to walk, you choose not to pursue immediate gratification or even comfort but simply to expand the number of things that might happen to you. Walking invests in the potentiality of your experience with almost no promise of tangible reward at all, which is something like being alive.

4. Watching: Severance

I, like everyone else, have been obsessed with Severance… I thought season 2 really delivered, can’t w8 for more !!!!!

5. Shopping: BLÅSVERK !!!

For the first time in years I visited an actual IKEA in person! Very fun / very overwhelming! To memorialize my conquest of the retail experience I left with a fun new lamp.