Busy Bee!

So, I'll address that elephant in the room...

...it's been awhile.

I promise though, I have been keeping busy! Since I have last blogged, I was officially published in Asylum Lake's Summer Anthology! As you know from previous posts, I was very excited about my collaboration with Jesse and now I'm even more excited that it is in print AND I can finally talk about it! I have 3 photographs in the issue, all of which were taken in England. Jesse had been working on a poem that happened to match up perfectly with one of my photos, "Carousel Fare", so we paired them up together. Then I told Jesse the stories behind my "Sea Shell Man" photograph and that inspired him to write a poem based off of that picture. That worked out so well that he did it again for "London Bridge". I had a vision for a layout and was dead-set on making it work out. I was going for a vintage/nostalgic/drifting away tone, so I began making our background. I crumpled up paper and stained it over and over again with coffee until it had the look that I wanted. I took pictures of the paper and began fiddling around with a layout in In-Design. I also searched to find the perfect typewriter fonts for our titles and Jesse's poems. Eventually I pieced it all together and with that, we had our six page layout (we are first in the issue too!). The last thing we had to do was write a short bio for ourselves. Jesse hates writing mini bios but I was determined that ours would be cute and funny. I worked on it for a bit and then had Jesse help me, and he even loved it in the end. You will have to look at an issue to see what it says, but the idea stemmed from how we use our fingers with our crafts and combined that thought with a song that Jesse wrote about us years ago. ANYWAY, I am so excited to be a part of the Summer Anthology and I've been telling everyone about it. Go check it out! There is some awesome stuff in there! You can find it at Michigan News Agency, People's Food Co-op, and Fourth Coast Cafe.

I have also been a busy bee taking photographs and editing them. I have focused a lot on the East Campus photos and I am trying to set up a Kickstarter account to raise funds for my project. I want to make a book of my collection and print 25 copies to have at a book release. I also want some other prints for display and I want to make an event out of it with refreshments and other do-dads. I will keep you posted on when that begins!

Since I've last been on, I have gone on a camping trip in Indiana for 10 days and visited my best friend, Katlin, in New York for about a week. So that is also why you haven't heard from me...I've been traveling without a computer. But don't worry, I've been taking pictures of my adventures and I will be posting some of those very soon =)

Oh! And I forgot to mention that I made my first photography sale through Etsy, so that is SUPER exciting. I logged on today to see that I had some wonderful feedback that made me smile =)

I'm trying to think of what else...
-Published in Asylum Lake with Jesse
-Taking/editing photos
-East Campus and keeping you posted on the Kickstarter
-Traveling to IN and NY (I will also be in MN for several days soon)
-Etsy Sale

Well I think that is it for now. I'm still waiting to see if any photographs will be published in Hear, Here or for the Study Abroad Contest. I'm trying to possibly have another Art Hop and I'm waiting to hear back about being on display at Crow's Nest, or having stuff for sale at Nature Connection. And of course, I am always working on printing more goods for my Etsy shop.

Stay tuned!
xoxo