mmiscellanea arts

Thanks for clicking on my link and taking this opportunity to learn a bit more about me, my life, and art.

About Me

I am in my 30s, live in Maryland and love making stuff—from sewing skirts to brewing my own beer, making my own paper to all the other myriads of projects I share on this site and Flickr. I’ve been tweeting as @miscellaneaarts since February 2008.

In April 2008, I joined a local gallery as an artist member (you can read more about that on my blog), and I participated in my first members’ exhibit in June of the same year. Though I no longer live in that area, the gallery show was an exciting push to expand my creativity onto canvases and into the real world (vs just publishing on my blog or Flickr)…though I haven’t quite come to grips with myself as an artiste.

Outside of that, I am co-parenting my teenage brother, a ridiculous-looking terrier, a rescued pit bull mix and two stray cats with my husband of eight years. I also work full-time as a consultant to non-profit groups and design web sites.

It’s overwhelming and lovely, sometimes all at once. I’m delighted to share it all with you and would love it if you left a comment on any of my blog posts, photographs or gave me a ping via Twitter. Getting to know more and more creative, funny, inspiring people from all around the nation and the globe is part of what motivates this whole thing, after all.

A few words about how I use Twitter

I tweet kind of a lot. I tweet my own thoughts, I converse with people and I retweet things that inspire me or make me laugh. I tweet about art and craft, yes, but I also tweet about food, web design, baseball, Project Runway, the space program, comics, and, during the month of August, I tweet a lot about sharks. I originally tried to have separate accounts for my artistic endeavors and my real life stuff, but I felt like that made the arty account feel very flat and fake. So, you get the whole kit and kaboodle.

I follow a lot of people, but I do not automatically follow everyone back. The big reasons why I don’t follow you back:

• Your twitter is nekkid. Not literally—I like an artful nude!—but rather you don’t have a profile photo, a bio or a web link. In essence, I know nothing about you or why I might want to follow back.
• Your interests and mine don’t intersect or your main interests are a periphery interest of mine. If you tweet about sharks or mixed media art, I’m probably already following you. However, if you tweet about baseball or knitting, not so much. Sometimes I do tweet about these things (some of my best friends are knitters, dontchaknow), but they are smaller spheres of interest for me.
• Your tweets reveal that you use Twitter as a bullhorn, not as a meeting ground. Examples include
  • All your tweets are Etsy or Artfire promotions or blog posts
  • All your tweets are automated location-based updates, like Foursquare
  • Very few of your tweets are @ replies
• Your last tweet was a link to a program to grow your Twitter followers. I always take this to mean that you added me via some mass-add program and aren’t going to be using Twitter in a friendly, non-spammy way.
• And, lastly, the quickest way to get me to revoke a follow: Sending me an auto DM that says “Thanks for the follow, check out my link.” Really, this is just bad form. I know there are tons of articles out there on the interwebs recommending this is how to win at Twitter, but just press the pause button for a moment and think about how this actually works. First, if I follow you and your Twitter profile has a link to your blog, I’ve probably already clicked it. I’m a smart and autonomous human being that way. Secondly, you’re making the choice for our first interaction to be a generic automated handshake. This is a lousy first impression for you and your business/services.

This isn’t meant to be snarky, but just to be clear about what doesn’t work for me on Twitter. I know plenty of articles are out there about using Twitter as a sales tool and those authors recommend things like auto DMs and automating all your Etsy sales to Twitter. It may even work. It just doesn’t work for me and I won’t be among your followers.

Where to go from here

If you’re interested in seeing more in what my blog has to offer, I recommend starting with my two weekly features:

• modus operandi on Tuesdays—techniques and thoughts about how I do what I do, plus shared inspiration
• Friday 5—every Friday, five photos of my studio space, sharing peeks at my stash and works in progress

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to hearing from you!