{ TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORT }
The goal of my work is to provide modern, clean design and handmade goods that have practical and lasting applications (e.g. printable stationery sets, recipe cards, school valentines, wall calendars, and more). I only create and sell things that I would actually buy myself – things for the person who loves design and admires beauty but who lives within a budget. My work is clean but colorful; simple but with a sense of humor; bold but still understated. Much of it is downloadable and DIY – I want people like me who love to create things to be able to have a personal library of gorgeous designs.
I started Up Up Creative in November 2008 after coming to the scary realization that writing my dissertation in English was making me miserable. A new mom battling postpartum depression, I suddenly found myself gripped by the fierce need to create.
To make things I would want to own. To find new ways of looking at things. To reacquaint myself with my own interests, my own aesthetic, my own creative voice. To create something that would be just mine, a business (if you want to call it that) that could give me the space to explore and to create and to inject myself into a community of artisans and crafters that I so desperately wanted to be a part of. To wholly reimagine what it can mean to be a mother, an artist, a wife, a daughter, a friend. To reimagine what a day could encompass. To recreate my life on my own terms. I am the illustrator and designer, owner and operator. I am the marketing department and the shipping department. Up Up Creative is all me, 100%. And I love it.
{ WHAT’S IN A NAME }
Fifteen months old at the time and always eager to express his wants with what limited vocabulary he possessed, my son named the shop. I asked him one day what I should call my little store and he said, “Up up?” Sure, what he really wanted was to be picked up, but as moms will do I pretended he was answering my question. The more I thought about it, though, the more I really liked it. So positive. So personal (because it’s what Evan is always saying). So easy to remember. It just fit.
{ A ONCE AND FUTURE PASSION }
My introduction to design was through my undergraduate degree in communication systems and technology. In my program, we studied human-computer interaction (how people actually use computers) and so much of what we talked about pertaining to communication had to do with visual communication. I was immediately taken in by the idea that the way something looks contributes to its meaning and to its function. It took me about ten years after I began in that program to really come around to this as a career. I did some freelance web design in my early twenties and also worked as an IT consultant and web programmer before returning to graduate school in English (I have always had a romantic attachment to books and I always thought I’d prefer teaching literature to undergraduates than teaching oral comm., thus the switch in fields for graduate school). It wasn’t until I was neck-deep in my dissertation that I suddenly found myself needing to make things all the time, and I’d say that in the last seven months since I started selling on Etsy my craft has really developed and I’ve started to find my own voice and style.