Monthly Ketchup: January 2026
Hello there. How are you? How has your year started? Over here it’s been fairly busy. It’s mostly been busy with behind the scenes stuff. I had a big client project that I spent a lot of time on this month in addition to working on wholesale and lots of other smaller tasks.
Events
It is currently the offseason for events, so I spent a good amount of time looking ahead for the year and getting prepared for the events that I want to apply for. I typically stick with 2 events per month. This past December was an exception and that made things really busy and stressful, but it’s one of those things that you just have to deal with if you want opportunity.
I’ve chatted with a few vendors this past year about Portland’s Saturday Market, so I’m planning to try that out this year. The application process is quite involved so I’ll be spending most of February working on getting the application submitted.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about what changes and improvements I want to make for my booth. Last year I remade all of my booth panels and those made a huge difference. Typically I make adjustments and refinements to the booth setup throughout the year, but I usually start things off by making bigger changes and then smaller tweaks and refinements follow throughout the year.
This time around, I’m sticking with the panel setup, but I want to remake the panels. The wood I used last year was cheap and fairly easy to work with, but since they were made from cheap wood, a lot of them were warped and showed a lot of wear and tear throughout the year. Now I’m thinking of remaking the panels with a material that is more durable. Another idea is to have one side of the panels be yellow and the opposite be purple. When I want to get into an event that is more dark/spooky themed, I can easily change the booth color scheme from yellow to purple to fit in with the event. So I have some experimenting to do.
Wholesale
A big push this past month was reworking my Faire Wholesale shop. I am planning to increase wholesale this year, so I needed to get my Faire shop ready. I added a whole bunch of new product and started working on some easy to use start bundles too. Now the hard work of reaching out to new shops is where I need to put my focus.
Drawings
My weekly newsletter helps to make sure I dedicate time to draw each week. Here is what I drew this past month.
Digital Art
I had someone reach out to me about digital art. They wrote up a nice blog post that does a deep dive of the basics of digital art. If that was something you were interested in, you should check it out here: https://kickersketch.com/what-is-digital-art/
Alright, that should do it for the January ketchup. Now to move on to February because time just keeps speeding by!