I love making things.
I love building things.
I love solving problems.
I love helping people solve problems.
I love making people happy.
I love giving people things they didn’t ask for, but something that they need.
I fulfill the desire to make others happy by creating effective designs for clients, and by developing an engaging curriculum for my students…but also I bake a lot of sweet goodies and give them to people, which inherently makes people happy.
I love to use effective visual communication (images speak louder than words!) to solve design problems.
This is why I love building furniture and things out of materials that are just sitting around our shop, and I love building a custom piece of furniture for a very specific purpose, for a very specific place.
I am a Design Educator (at Marietta College) because I think that solving problems with visual communication is a superpower and I want to empower as many people as possible. It is so fulfilling when students get excited about using their newfound power on projects within other disciplines.
Here I am building the woodblock serving trays—they’re made out of all the woodblocks we use for printing. When we are done printing an edition, we don’t print from them again, so I put them to use: functional art!
Personal Projects
These projects were not commissioned by any client—I created them because I wanted to.
Soil Mates: Companion Planting for your Vegetable Garden
I wrote and designed this book and it was published by Quirk Books. In this charming guide to companion planting for your vegetable-garden favorites, you’ll learn why Broccoli ♥ Rosemary and whether Cucumber + Corn = friends with benefits. (Just watch out for Celery! Leggy and leafy, she is notoriously easygoing and will happily settle down with just about anyone, raising a ruckus in your raised beds.) Complete with 20 pairings, tasty recipes, preparation tips, and more, Soil Mates is the perfect partner for your horticultural matchmaker.
“Cute phrases are slathered on like cream cheese.”
—New York Times Book Review
Why I made this: I was interested in learning how to start a vegetable garden and was told about companion planting by a family member. However, when I wanted to learn more, I found the books about the subject to be very overwhelming with content and underwhelming with visual aids. So I thought, companion planting…sounds like dating…a dating guide for vegetables=perfect!
Talk Football App
Learn all the things you need to know in order to have a conversation about football without information overload. Trivia about the game, the ins, and outs of positions, as well as easy-to-understand explanations of the rules, are all covered in Talk Football.
Why I made this: Football is hard to understand. I did not grow up watching football, but my husband loves it. I was embarrassed to ask him the same questions about the game over and over, so I decided to make my own incognito guide to the game and figured others might benefit from it too.
Download for free!
Anxietzz
How often are you kept from sleep by all your worries? This pillow clock is embroidered with the very anxieties that prevent us from drifting off into slumber. This collection of worries, at the very least, can give you something to read while you're awake.
Why I made this: I suffer from nighttime anxieties a lot, so I wanted to funnel this negative experience with two things I like— typography and embroidery. I made it a clock because I like to make things that have a function.