Favourite Shops - prettygoodthings

I'm just in love with prettygoodthings... I'm rather jealous of the quirky style that's going on

Tell us a bit about yourself.
My name is Mary Pattavina and I am the owner/designer of Pretty Good Things. I am married, live in Lincoln, NE and have an addition to candy and popcorn.

Describe your craft
I make hats, fascinators and other accoutrements/do-dads for ladies of the radical variety.

How did you get started with your craft?
I didn’t have a clue what I was doing with my life after undergrad, but I knew that making was something I needed to continue doing. I graduated from the University of Nebraska in 2003 with my BFA in studio art and in 2004 PGT was born. During the first few years it wasn’t really a serious venture – more of a hobby and no focus or direction– a ‘oh wouldn’t that be fun’ type of a dream. I worked in the “real world” for a couple years after and returned to get my graduate degree in apparel design from UNL. It was during the summer of 2008 that I started making fascinators. The first one I made was the Oh Deer Fascinator – though it has evolved since then. I quickly realized this was the direction I needed to take because making and building these 3D fashion objects was a good mix of things that spoke to me.: drawing/sketching, sculpting/constructing, crafting. It just fit.

What is your earliest crafting memory?.
One of my earliest memories of crafting solo (you know, outside of school, or supervised events) is making these faceless folksy dolls out of calico remnants my mom had. They were stuffed with cotton balls and glued together with white Elmer’s glue. I was probably 7? And man was I proud of those things! I still have them.

What are your favorite materials to work with/favorite mediums?
I’m an 8 year old half-human half-magpie at heart so I find I am really attracted to anything miniature, sparkly, iridescent, bright or in rainbow order: sequins, glitter, polka dots, animal prints….toys and figurines. I love making wearable dioramas! You know, I am really all over the place: I tend to use repurposed fabric from old blouses, etc. in a lot of pieces. I love soft fluttery things, like organza and chiffon…but man can those things be a pain to cut and sew! I usually look for light weight fabrics – crisp taffeta, lightweight knits and woven fabrics when making hats. The last thing you want is a heavy headpiece! I do love gravity but sometimes it can be a creative challenge to engineer around. Thank goodness for starch, buckram and wire! When I draw or paint I use watercolor, pen/ink/marker, and graphite the most.

How did you come up with your store name?
Picking a name was pretty frustrating as I recall. I had some help. My husband (then boyfriend) helped me find clarity after I was having trouble coming up with one I was satisfied with. This is how I recall it went down: Nick: ‘so…describe what you do.’ Me (frustrated): ‘ugh. Ok. Well. I make things. I dunno. They’re pretty. They are good.’ Nick: ‘why not Pretty Good Things? And so it went!

Apart from creating things, what do you do?
I currently just work for my small business Pretty Good Things. Although my past resume contains varied skills:
Instructor at the University of Nebraska to Art Supply Store sales associate to maid/room inspector to insurance agent! (but I think I am done with the hospitality and insurance industries, thanks! :)

Where does your inspiration come from?
I feel like my pieces are inspired by playful concepts, “girlie” themes and silhouettes. There’s a lot of nature involved in my pieces too – bunnies, underwater influence, flowers.

What does handmade mean to you?
I guess handmade usually describes an object’s birth but I like to think about the word and what it means between two people. Handmade connects people in meaningful ways. Handmade gifts are often the most treasured. And when I find myself shopping handmade I know I am directly supporting another human being doing something - creating something they love. And to me, that’s pretty darn cool.

What handmade possession do you most cherish?
A tiny purple warm fuzzy made by my kindgergarten teacher. I also am deeply attached to a couple mini books I made when I was 5 or 6.

How do you get out of your creative ruts?
I walk away from things. Take a day off of work. Focus on me. Feel sorry for myself and then stop feeling sorry for myself. Sketch for fun. Meditate. Relax with a glass of wine. I have to remind myself to be patient and not force it.

Where would you like to be in ten years?
On a personal ten year plan, I’d be delighted to own a home with my husband and if we’re especially lucky to have the funds to swing visiting long distance friends much more often and go on vacation for a week at a time! Oh that would be pretty rad.
In the business end of things, in ten years I PGT will be my sole source of income and I won’t rely on working elsewhere to make ends meet. I would like PGT hats and accessories in many more shops around the country – but still trying to maintain the handmade nature of things. I hope to expand my wedding line and work with more brides with non-traditional tastes…like beautiful, fun, bright wedding veils and headpieces!

Where can you be found online? (besides on Etsy)
prettygoodthings.com
twitter.com/MaryPGT
facebook.com/PrettyGoodThings
pinterest.com/prettygoodthing/
flickr.com/photos/marypattavina/

What would people be most surprised to learn about you?
Hum. That’s a good question! I wish I could say something really fascinating…like I am Dolly Parton’s niece. Or my biological dad is Elvis Presley. But I feel like I’m just a regular gal with certain talents, hang-ups and all the rest of the good stuff that makes humans totally unique and completely the same all at once.

What did you like to do when you aren't crafting?
I enjoy relaxing reading or watching mysteries and hanging out with my dude. I’m a self proclaimed candy and popcorn junkie so often you can find me relaxing with these things in hand. I love illustrating/painting/drawing. Sometimes I feel as though my business is my hobby – which I don’t mind in the least! I love my “job”!

Favourite Shops - Little Alexander

  Isn't this shop just beautiful! I stumbled across Little Alexander on one of my 'find pretty thing on Etsy' times. They seem such lovely people too from their answers! I wish they lived closer (or I lived closer) for talks about chickens and crafting life! 

Tell us a bit about yourself.
We're a partnership of two girls, K + A, K being the artist and A (that's me) being the everything else. Everything else includes usually speaking for our partnership (voila) as well as making notebooks. We like nothing more than spending every minute of every day together, so it's been great to share a business as well as a home. We live at Headquarters, an old farmhouse on 3 acres (about 12000 square meters) out in the rural Midwest of the United States, surrounded by corn and soybean fields. K loves the four distinct seasons we get here, but I sorta miss the temperate maritime climate of Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, our previous home. Probably New Zealand would be great for me.


Describe your craft
We make illustrated paper goods. K's art is really the centerpiece of our work, but we both really love paper in all its forms and love being able to translate artwork into useful things you can hold and use and carry around with you rather than just hang on your wall. As letter writers we make notecards and postcards, and as listers and doodlers we make handmade notebooks, all of which feature K's illustrations. We occasionally sell K's original artwork through our Etsy shop as well.

How did you get started with your craft?
K has been making art forever, but Little Alexander really got started when we had both grown tired of working our 'real' jobs. We were feeling like sell-outs at our respective places of employment and desperately wanted to be doing something different, something where we could be more independent, something we could do with integrity, something that used more of our bodies than just our brains, and something we could take with us anywhere. K quit her job first and started working on watercolor pieces to make into cards. I quit my job not long after to help out and we moved across the country to start a new life with Little Alexander at the center.



What is your earliest crafting memory?
I asked K about this and she got this distant and shining look on her face. She described a day in preschool when they put shaving cream out on the table, and you could flatten it out and draw in it with your finger, then smooth it out then draw in it again, and on and on. Her face then clouds over as she also remembers how much she loved drawing with pencil on the desktops at school ("they're smooth and slick but the pencil shows up so dark on them") and how her 2nd grade teacher caught her when the whole surface was covered with her drawings and made her clean them all off.

What are your favourite materials to work with/favourite mediums?
K really likes drawing with pencil on scratch paper. From there, her images sometime become stencils, sometimes get scanned onto the computer and digitally colored, or sometimes are transferred onto thicker paper and watercolored. She loves experimenting, though, so while there are some constants (pencil drawings, watercolor), there are always new things, too. Block printing, for example, is getting exciting. Expect to see some of that show up in our shop in not too long.

We also have particular papers we love. French Paper is a great company who makes amazing papers in great colors, many with 100% recycled content. We're also very into Neenah's soft thick Lettra paper at the moment, made from reclaimed cotton. But maybe our most unique paper source is the paperboard from cereal boxes and the like. Our whole community saves their boxes for us to repurpose into notebook covers and envelopes for mailing.

How did you come up with your store name?
Little Alexander is a translation of our Italian last name, Alesandrini.


Apart from creating things, what do you do?
We're working on fixing up our old farmhouse and the land around it. We're working to put in more gardens and fruit trees and restore a stretch of it to tall grass prairie, the ecosystem that was here before the Midwest became cropland. I'm also a beekeeper, and K is also a knitter and a spinner and a pianist. We keep our life pretty simple, and still there never seems to be quite enough time.

Where does your inspiration come from?
K draws things she likes. Luckily she likes very many things. Getting inspired about what to draw has never been as hard for her as getting inspired to sit down and make art in the first place. It is so easy to get bogged down in everyday things and so easy to lose faith that what you're doing as an artist is worthwhile. K then sees her inspirations as the things that distract her from everyday tasks and doubts and get her excited about the world. And that kind of inspiration can come from books or conversations or fashion or almost anywhere, most often where people show off their own passions. Passion is contagious.

What does handmade mean to you?
That's a big question. We can get kind of obsessive when it comes to handmade, homemade and from scratch. For example, we make our own bread from flour, salt, oil, sugar, and yeast. Is that homemade? Is that from scratch? Yes, compared to buying bread at the store. But what about someone who makes their bread from a package mix? Or what if we grew our own wheat and ground our own flour? Does it matter if we kneaded it all by hand? Clearly there is a spectrum. We think the same is true for handmade goods.

It is important to us that our all images are original artwork by K. It is important to us that our notebooks are cut and folded and bound ourselves. It even matters to us that we do all our own image reproduction, even if we're using a printer as often as a stencil. We don't make our own paper or even all our own envelopes. But we have lovingly handled and shaped everything we sell in our shop, and we feel personally connected to each piece. That's where we sit on the handmade spectrum.


What handmade possession do you most cherish?
K's mom was a quilter, and we have two of her quilts. They are so beautiful, and hopefully will last for generations.

How do you get out of your creative ruts?
This is actually where a lot of K's experimenting with new media comes in. Whenever things are getting stale, she'll put away the materials she most often works with and pick up something new. It seems to work well for her.


Where would you like to be in ten years?

Ha! Our past history suggests we have about a 3 year attention span when it comes to big life plans. Sometimes we hope that we've broken that habit and in ten years we'll still be right here making beautiful things. Sometimes we still dream of all the things one can do in a life that we haven't done yet… We're only a year and a half into our current life and for the moment, anyway, still pretty rooted in the present.

Where can you be found online? (besides on Etsy)
We keep a blog (blog.alesandrini.com) and are on Facebook (facebook.com/LittleAlexander). K occasionally tweets (@lilAlexander) and has an illustration portfolio site (www.alesandrini.com).


What would people be most surprised to learn about you?
We're math and science nerds. My degree was in physics and I taught high school science before we started Little Alexander. One of the exceptions to the 'K is the artist, I am the everything else' role division of our business is the accounting, which K loves doing too much to turn over to me. She'd tell you she considers all the necessary number juggling to be one of the perks of owning our own business.

What did you like to do when you aren't crafting?


We love food, so many of our pleasures are related to that. We garden and keep chickens, which means great fresh produce and eggs, and we love to cook almost as much as we love to eat. We also love to be outside in beautiful places. That could be backpacking in the mountains or wandering through big city streets or just laying around under our trees.

Favourite Shops - Shupg

Hello Everyone, today I am featuring Shupg which is one of my favourite shops on Etsy, check out those cute chicken necklaces! I want one!!!

 

 

Tell us a bit about yourself.
I teach violin in the day, and enjoy playing in chamber groups, orchestras and also in church. I cannot resist a fluffy animal, usually dogs. Can't wait for the day I get to live in a farm, maybe I should join The Farmer Finds a Wife.


Describe your craft
I'm not sure I am skilled enough to be called a crafter, but I certainly enjoy letting my thoughts interact with one another and somehow things get made! Bus rides are the best, alone time but with enough stimulation around and outside.


How did you get started with your craft?
I left a 24-7 job in the media industry because it didn't allow me to be creative (falling asleep standing up and having my Dad say "Are you just going out or coming home?" at 430am doesn't help either). Not all jobs in the industry are like that, but I just drew a short straw on that one. No regrets, the time I had there only prepped me better for the life now. I then went back to my passion, music-making, and making handmade just made sense to me (after I accompanied a great friend on her treasure-picking trips in the many craft shops) because it allowed me to be as creative as I could be. Still learning loads!


What is your earliest crafting memory?
I think it was when I was a kid, I made myself and my brothers Christmas stockings from brown shopping bags.


What are your favourite materials to work with/favourite mediums?
Love wood, and then thread and fabric. Found bits are great too. I like to see a piece of something and think about all its possibilities. It's kinda like teaching, isn't it?


How did you come up with your store name?
It's a childhood nickname. :) It sounds like part of my mandarin name.


Apart from creating things, what do you do?
I teach the violin, do freelance writing and video post production. Actually I wouldn't mind doing anything at least once. Zookeeper might be on the books :)

Where does your inspiration come from?
Everywhere really! But I really do like nature and could stare at greens for ages. Not enough of it at all in urban Singapore.

What does handmade mean to you?
An expression of what a person is made of. Of character.


What handmade possession do you most cherish?
I love all the drawings and little things my students make for me. Children are so creative.


How do you get out of your creative ruts?
I usually give it a bit of time. Take some time out and just be alone for awhile. It energises me.


Where would you like to be in ten years?
Owning a shop cum music studio. Or on a mission trip. But let me pray about it.

Where can you be found online? (besides on Etsy)

I have sold some items to a distributor in Barcelona, so I suppose I can be found in parts of Spain. Also am in a fabulous shop, Dulcetfig, in Singapore's Haji Lane. Am looking forward to being in more places all over the world!


What would people be most surprised to learn about you?
Hmm, I'm not sure I'm such an exciting person. I suppose that... I love watching Masterchef but can't cook for nuts!

What did you like to do when you aren't crafting?
I'm sort of a routine-animal, I like doing some things the same all the time, a little OCD you could say :) Am currently pinteresting like nuts. Reading every chance I get. Spend time with my family (so precious, never underestimate it) and dog.