Monthly Ketchup: May 2025
Hello! This is my first month-long recap that I’ll be calling the Monthly Ketchup. I was doing this on a weekly basis, but that was really difficult to stick to and I’m not sure a weekly recap was necessary. In fact, it felt like a little bit of overkill. So, hopefully this monthly recap will be a better fit for myself and for the readers. If you do want to see a more frequent update, be sure to follow me on instagram and join my weekly newsletter. Ok, let’s get started. What did I do of the month of May?
Events
May is really the kickoff month for events. From this point until the end of the year, I will most likely be doing multiple events each month. May kicked things off with the spring Crafty Wonderland. This is always a fun event to do because there is always a great crowd and I get the chance to see my vendor friends. The event itself was pretty slow. In fact, the spring event is usually slow, but this year was quite slower than expected.
The second weekend of the month was taken over by the St. Johns Bizarre. This is the second time I’ve done this outdoor event and compared to last year, the weather was cooler and cloudier which was very much welcome. Last year was blazing hot! The crowd really showed up for this event. I was busy the whole time and did really well in terms of sales. I was very glad to be at this event and will definitely plan to return next year.
Next month will have 2 Pride themed events that I’ll be at, starting with the Hillsboro Pride Party. I have events planned all the way through September, but I also need to look into October, November and December so that I don’t miss out on application deadlines. Another fun event that I’m planning is an October featured artist event at a shop in St. Johns. I've been chatting with the shop and am having fun coming up with ideas for the month. I even got a chance to visit the shop to check out the space.
Projects
Aside from events, I spent some time working on booth upgrades and expansions. I didn’t have too much time to make a lot of progress, but that’s ok. I’m not planning to have the expansion done for a while. With the little time I have, I just work on one part at a time. After the St. Johns Bizarre, I started to get really low on my woodcut inventory, so I started a new batch that will include a new monster skull design that I had a lot of fun working on. I decided to play around with splatter paint effects on the horns of this design and really enjoyed the way it turned out. In fact, I’m eager to get another batch started so I can play around with more splatter effects more. I'm not quite done with this batch, but I should be finished by next week.
Another project I worked on was photographing new products. There are a few items I’ve been sitting on for a while because of time. I have some new stickers and earrings that will be making their way to the shop soon. This next month, I’ll need to get the this new batch of woodcuts photographed too. So, photographing product seems like a never ending task.
Drawings
Sometimes I’m amazed that I’m still able to keep up with the weekly newsletter. Things get really busy, but I always carve out time for new drawings which is really important. Here are the drawings I made this month.
Client Work
As always, client work is a constant. I have various projects that I’m always working on. The big one this month was sketching out a second picture book. Hopefully I can get the art taken care of within the next month so that I can free up this bottleneck of time that I’m living in.
And with that, May is considered a wrap! On to June! Be sure to join my weekly newsletter and follow me on Instagram!
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