Back in November, artist Christina Miglino of Conjure Movement reached out to me to see if I'd be interested in a collaboration, as she had been doing some interesting mixed media pattern work and thought it would be cool to see those patterns come to life through my products. I was initially very interested in this idea, especially after looking at all her amazing work, but was overwhelmed and busy with the crazy holiday season at the time. We kept in touch over the next several months and even though Christina had moved out to Seattle, we both were still interested in the project and wanted to see it come to life!
As I learned very quickly, it's kind of hard to get a side project going, especially when there are some start up costs to begin with and both collaborators have so many other things going on. But what I also learned is that if you just continue to take small steps forward, and start carving out some time, it's definitely possibly to make these side projects come to life! It also helped that Christina is so awesome and was super flexible and understanding about my schedule and my needing to get some other projects out of the way and saving up a bit of extra funds to make the printing happen.
So once we got going, I had Christina hand draw three different black and white patterns, and I gave her free reign to design whatever she wanted. Then I had those patterns screen printed here in Denver by awesome local print shop Ink Lounge. We printed them in black ink on both cream and kraft card stock and text weight paper from French Paper Co., so I'd have plenty of options to make all the Craftbelly products. They turned out AWESOME. The patterns are amazing and all so different, and they make such a neat collection. It's also very inspiring for me to get to make new products using these beautiful patterns that came from her perspective.
Having done this first ever collaboration has really made me want to collaborate more with artists in the future. Of course I love designing my own patterns, but there's something quite inspiring and refreshing with working with other creatives, especially when I'm mostly sitting by myself in my studio. I think it would be really fun to do a couple collaborations every year, creating different limited editions of products. Also, I was surprised that I actually kind of enjoyed figuring out the logistics of it, such as how we would split the profits and the different responsibilities we each had. Weird right? Doesn't seem to be the thing you'd think I'd be into... but I'm noticing that the longer I run this business, the more I'm into the more "businessy" parts, for lack of a better term.
The limited edition frames, cards, journals, etc., will be available for sale soon on my website and I'll be bringing them to the next couple of craft fairs that I'll be selling at. OH, and what I would also like to mention is that Christina and I have still never met each other, or heard each other's voice! This was all done over email, which I think is kind of amazing. I think she is super rad and I really hope to meet her in person one day!
To follow Christina online, you can check her out at the following places:
http://conjuremovement.virb.com - website
@christinamiglino - instagram
@conjuremovement - twitter
