lulu makes

Since I finished the Print Bazaar last year, I took a break from printmaking. I decided that in 2026 I would start on another childhood dream: making my own clothes. I've had a sewing machine for several years but not used it much. I took a couple classes to get familiar with it, and left them feeling quite comfortable with the basics. Then I proceeded in the way I always go about hobbies: gather lots of ideas from 'easy' to 'pipe dream', buy materials for projects along that entire spectrum all at once, and start not quite in the middle but definitely not all the way at 'easy'.

A tank top! Clothes don't get much simpler than tank tops. So I take this soft stretchy jersey (stretchy fabrics are harder to cut) with these cute muted stripes (that really should either line up perfectly or not at all) and get to work. I don't have a huge work table or a big cutting mat to protect the dining table, so I have to cut on cardboard on the basement floor (so many things wrong with that). But this definitely looks like a tank top.

When all's said and done, the seams are sloppy, the stripes line up about 90%, and it's frankly a little tight. For a first project, not a disaster. Next up, a house coat! Some stripey (again?!) canvas (so heavy), but let's line it and make it cozy - flannel for the body, and a silky bemberg (not beginner-friendly!) inside the sleeves to prevent friction. Sure, the pattern doesn't account for 2 different linings but that sounds like an easy adjustment (what am I thinking).

Everything comes together and at a glance it looks alright.

The stripes line up really well this time! The flannel is, in fact, cozy. But the bemberg was so hard to cut cleanly, and since the pattern didn't account for 2 different linings, the interior shoulder seams don't line up at all. The sleeve cuffs are different widths, and I had to keep trimming and re-pressing the pockets because they weren't the same size or shape.

Then there was a pair of pants cut poorly such that the waist is crooked, and a recently-shelved rayon crepe blouse that was - again - cut poorly, which I didn't realize till almost the last step when I saw that the back piece was multiple inches wider and longer than the finished front piece and ALSO the sleeves attached at different angles.

Cutting fabric into matching pieces along the intended lines of a pattern is so hard. It's so hard that it feels kind of dumb. Repeatedly, across multiple projects, I would line up my cut pieces for one step of the garment and find that they were not the same. Then I had to play these betting games of what's the most important place for them to match; how much shorter than the pattern piece is okay; which curve grade is least bad? I was struggling to the point that I kind of crashed out to my partner the other day, saying "If these are beginner patterns and I can't do kindergarten shit like cutting a straight line, how dumb am I??!" To which he kindly pointed out that, actually, cutting a straight line on multiple pieces of fabric that move around as you cut them sounds very hard. And that when people spend years learning garment-making they're not just getting good at sewing things together.

Right now, garment-making feels unforgiving. You can get very far into a piece before you find that something is wrong. Maybe you can unpick the stitches and try again, but maybe you did fuck up the cutting and you don't have enough fabric to replace it. Those aforementioned pants? I recut the offending waist piece twice, having to patch the final piece together from two smaller pieces of fabric. Or maybe you're using a delicate fabric (like rayon crepe) that can't handle repeated re-stitching. So you either give up on it or you start over - buy more fabric and wash and press and cut the pieces again...

If you don't like how a linoprint turns out, you mostly can go "well okay" and get another piece of paper and ink up again. Sometimes you do have to start over and carve a whole new block. But I've felt like mistakes in printing are much more forgiving; you can transform a mistake into another piece or sell a misprint for 5 or 10 bucks. Not so much with clothes that pucker at the seams or have lopsided sleeves or don't stretch because you accidentally cut a piece against the grainline. Paper and ink aren't free, but printing is generally a lot cheaper per finished product than making pants.

The Print Bazaar was a tremendous day - both as a first for me and also holy cow so much happened. I only had a vague idea of what to expect going to into it: it would be busy and overstimulating, I would be stuck at the table pretty much all day, I would not poop as per my usual schedule. With lots of time to prep, I thought I had covered many of my bases, but there was still a lot I only realized once I was in it. (Bless my partner, he took many notes.)

Some takeaways and things I learned:

For the love of god, bring cash. We were STUNNED how many people wanted to pay that way, and we were soon (frantically) looking for ATMs in order to make change. Do not underestimate this.

I wish I had curated my inventory more thoughtfully. I keep a running list of pieces I want to make, and to prep for the Bazaar I chose things at the intersection of "I can finish this within 2 months" and "I think people will be interested in this." But this led to me having an inventory of two minds, kind of. I had my beloved Fiends and also a chubby little wren on a branch with cute red berries; I had a small b&w accordion booklet about getting dental implants and also cheekily misprinted "I heart misprints" with a big red heart. These are Very Different Vibes. I don't know how it made people feel about my display, but I did feel a little sloppy for a less-focused body of work. Which goes hand-in-hand with -

Think specifically about your audience and the event itself when prepping your inventory. Despite being called a "Print Bazaar", which sounds kind of indie and quirky, the event is advertised as a "holiday market", which sounds much more normie. And the crowd kind of was! Lots of folks around my age looking for gifts for their parents. More suburban-looking, affluent-looking families than I expected. My gritty and emotional stuff didn't move much. But I completely sold out of the aforementioned chubby wren - even all the misprints (which I thought were messy as fuck)! The goose sold well, too. I had a handful of tiny ginkgo test prints, and people snatched those right up. Maybe the gnarlier stuff would have sold better if it had been 80-100% of my inventory - but I think more so it was the wrong audience. In short: people still fucking love birds.

Financials: I made almost $800 in sales. I didn't track my expenses going into this - for a long time I was making things without the intent to sell, so I didn't keep receipts; I also tend to buy a variety of things at once (i.e., not all printmaking supplies) and it's hard to keep track of what's used for merchandise. There are also things I paid for this time but won't need to again for a while, like a table ($50) and display racks ($100 total) and business cards ($150). But let's consider hourly wages from labor alone. I definitely spent more than 10 hours working on my inventory, so there goes a highly lucrative $80/hr. Eighty hours over two months? Probably not - in the final week alone I estimated about 30 hours of work left to do. So we're talking at least 100 hours, which makes for an hourly rate of about $8. (Minimum wage in Missouri is now over $13.) Take away even the handful of things I know I spent on, and it's a pathetically small margin.

In the last two hours or so (4-6pm) I put up a "Help-Me-Not-Take-All-This-Home Sale" sign and knocked a few bucks off everything. If someone lingered on a particular piece, I called out the sign: "If you're interested in anything, I'll take the price down - you know, hahah, save everyone some trouble at the end of the day!" I can't prove that sealed the deal, but every time I did it resulted in a sale.

I'm eager to go again, and even to try my hand at another event next year. I'm excited to take what I learned and do more. I want some kind of metric by which to succeed next time, but I'm not sure what yet.

Recently I went to a studio with printing presses(!!) to try to run some really nice copies of a piece I'll be selling at the print bazaar. I thought I had been very smart - previously I printed this piece in multiple layers, but I decided to cut the blocks and jigsaw them to print two layers at once. Turns out the ink I've been using dries too fast (read: is too cheap) for that. No big; the studio had some oil-based inks and I used those to get some good prints off.

At the end of the session I had to pack up quickly, since a storm was coming and I didn't want to run to my car in the rain with a box full of paper. In doing so, I accidentally smudged the blue plate on the yellow one. Annoying. But you clean the plate off and it's good, right? Those blue spots are just stains, and fresh ink will roll right over them and not come off in printing...right?

Wrong. Not oil-based ink. Not if you don't clean it correctly. The cheap water-based stuff I usually use, sure - wipe it off, let it dry, use whatever color you want. But these plates were fucked.

I learned this a few days later, at the start of what was to be a whole morning of printing. I ran the first one, panicked, then ran a second to be really super sure there was way around it. Maybe I could look up how to clean them better and go buy the right soap and spend the morning doing that instead. Maybe I'd abandon ship on printing more and say "Well now it's an edition of 6 I guess."

Both options felt overwhelming and dire. I really like this piece, I think it'll sell, I want to have more of it! But it was impossible to know what, if anything, would work out. If I was going to make progress I had to simply move on.

Today I decided that yes, in fact, those plates are fucked. I'm not going to try to save them, or even recut the smudged one. They're done. Six of those prints exist (sans two misprints), and now they're "suneater I". I'll make them again someday soon - I really do think it's a good piece - and edition them as "suneater II".

That's kind of fun, I think. "'Two?' What happened to 'one'?" Well I fucked up "one," that's what. And now it's super rare. And I'll never be famous enough that that matters to anyone, but it does feel a little cool.

I'm super excited to say that next month I'll be participating in the annual Cherokee Street Print Bazaar! https://www.cherokeeprintbazaar.com/

I submitted to this as my last "let's see what kind of karma I paid for by almost dying multiple times this year" bet of 2025. In all honesty, I didn't expect to get in. call it decades of undercutting my self-confidence, but I truly felt I didn't have enough to show for myself. But here we are! There I'll be!

As a kid I aspired to sell my work at cons or markets or shows. In my 20s I felt that slip away from me. Throughout college my confidence dwindled, inspiration eluded me, and I stopped chasing art as expression. The explosion of acceptance and validation I've received this year is truly so weird, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't fighting some amount of imposter syndrome. I worry that I'm underestimating how much work this event will be: how much prep is necessary, how long it will take to produce enough inventory, how stressful it will be to be publicly available for seven hours while strangers judge me and my self-expression for monetary value. I think, "I don't care if no one buys anything, I'll be happy just to be there" - and I cross my fingers that I'll still feel that way when it actually happens. What if I get through the market and it's not a disaster, but afterwards I crash and am burnt out for days? The thing I wanted is here, and it's kind of scary.

Something I've been working on is letting two things be true at the same time. This commitment is scary, and I want to do it. It's going to be a huge amount of work, and I can only do one thing at a time. I need to get a lot done, and I also have to relax and live my life.

This is the poem I recently got published. I grew up close to Lake Michigan, and since my family was pretty poor it was the most affordable vacation we could take every summer. Get up in the morning, pack everyone into the station wagon, spend the day at the public beach, come home sun-tired and warm all the way through. Since moving states away, I hadn't gone back (or to any beach) in a long time. A couple years ago I took a solo road trip to see the lake again. While talking to some friends about it before I left, one of them asked me "What does it mean to go to Lake Michigan?" This friend is unafraid to ask questions like that. I asked her what she meant. She said, "I feel like every time I hear someone talk about going to Lake Michigan it, like, means something to them. What's that about?" I told her I'd think about it while I was there. This is my answer.

So, this is my typical creative cycle:

Have an idea that feels just so fucking cool

Start making it exist

Revise, edit - still feels exciting!

Revise, edit - I wanna get this done

Revise, edit - is this...even a good idea?

Put it down for at least 2 weeks

Return to it, thinking "eeuughhh this is nothing now"

Is this a relatable feeling? That looking at your work for a long time really takes the shine off it, till you feel like there's no way it'd be exciting or novel or cool to anyone else who would see it? Not that it's necessarily bad, just...pedestrian.

It's been a huge hurdle for me in getting used to finishing things. I'm not someone (right now, at least) who knocks a piece out in one sitting. Partly I don't know enough to work quickly, partly I just make better revisions with time. But when that feeling starts, I have so much trouble continuing the process. Usually I still want to finish the thing. I still have faith in the original idea - I just feel like I'm failing to express it as excitingly as I want.

I saw this on bsky recently:

It's been on my mind so much. Maybe ironically, I feel like blockprinting makes it easier to follow this advice. I hate a cluttered home; if I carve a 12x12 block and NEVER print it, I'm gonna get pissed at myself for letting it take up space for no reason. Pencils and paints and brushes can go in a box and I don't have to see them. But I will lose (and have lost) my mind trying to find somewhere to put lino blocks that haven't seen a drop of ink.

But also I feel like it gave me a permission that I didn't know I needed. I carved this 5x4 block with a couple ginkgo leaves. Not particularly stylized, nothing stunning or fresh about it. Just two leaves. I've been printing it occasionally in various colors, and every time I print it I've finished a small project.

This year has been bizarre (on a personal level, specifically). Summer beset me with a series of pretty comical disasters, including a car crash that knocked one of my teeth out while on the way to a dentist appointment. But somehow it's also been a summer of artistic recognition. A prize accepted for SGDQ, art in two fundraisers for local tornado relief, a poem(!) in a Midwest queer artists' zine. It's been a weird trade-off.

I slumped for a while. But for some reason in the past month I really committed to linoprinting. I have space in my office now for a little 'art desk', so when I don't feel like working I can spin around and carve for a bit. I picked up some books on linocut from the library and felt like I need to try every method and process that was suddenly revealed to me. I had previously-unknown heights I wanted to reach; Laura Boswell's landscapes left me gobsmacked.

She uses the reduction printing method (in a way that I barely comprehend). I have a design that I want in multi-color and thought I would have to carve at least 3 blocks for, but I realized it would be a good candidate for reduction printing! I needed to practice a destructive method before I went all-in on it, though. I have three little Pokemon model kits on my desk - Bulbasaur, Piplup, and Scorbunny. Perfect designs to practice with!

No trouble printing Bulbasaur and Scorbunny. But I fucked up on Piplup. Then I fucked up again. Then I fucked up a third time. I wasted three lino blocks, 10 pieces of (not-cheap) paper, and a lot of ink. After each mistake I got frustrated and charged ahead to try to fix it and made another mistake. I got so annoyed that I walked away and took a nap.

I'm not usually a "no failure is a waste!" kind of person. But I need to approach art that way. It sucks that I need to buy more blue ink now; it's annoying that I need to drive to the store in the county that sells printmaking paper by the sheet. Also, I learned I need to double-check my blocks when I think I'm done carving. I need to run a test print, and probably take a break for a bit, then look at it again to make sure it's what I want.

It's hard to follow artists online who post multiple pieces a week. I feel like I'm too slow. So I'm trying to enjoy going at whatever my pace is. To be unhappy with something for a day or two, and keep revising it, and know that it will result in something I think has merit. Printmaking is a pretty slow process, anyway! It's kinda crazy to try to do it differently.

gold rabbits, linoprint

anyway, Rath did get accepted to SGDQ!

they called my boy "immaculate", I almost cried. the video framing is garbage because I was too excited to keep my phone in the right place, and the notification sounds are from texting friends to say "omg look look at him" :D

Days 4-6: red kite, crimson topaz hummingbird, stonechat

So, I did last month's #birbfest as blind contour drawings (do we have a better name for those yet?). I could spend a minute or less on each one, so making up 4-5 in one day wouldn't take much time. I love birds, I love looking at them, I love learning their funny little names. And a benefit of the form is that your standards don't matter; you just go and you can't undo and you can't judge along the way.

I waited till after January to share any drawings in order to make sure I finished. I'll try to post them a few at a time. Some kinda rule. Some are delightfully bizarre. Some might even have color!

Days 1-3: Ross' turaco, piping plover (and chick), lazuli bunting