spoopy guys

 spooky season is the best season. i've been brimming with spooky ideas but it's taken a while to actually finish something. I call him a frompkin. Or a frumpkin, depending on my heart on any particular day.

these are available to buy here, or click each photo for the specific link to that exact shirt!

originally posted Sept 2 2026

i love tie dye

 this is a thing that has been true of me for as long as I have known tie dye exists.

I have historically tried to make every tie dyed shirt absolutely perfect, and when that has inevitably not worked out, I've been deflated and ignored my tie dye supplies again for a few years. I always tried to make everything a perfect rainbow, because tie dye + gay is a pretty winning combination, except that also resulted in a lot of muddy blobs because if you mix all the colours it just turns brown.

I was feeling fairly dejected about clothing lately, feeling like I'm really excited about a lot of the t-shirts I've been making, but also that most of the shirts I make are not shirts I would personally wear, because I'm pretty consistent in the color palette I wear and it's mostly very dark colours that don't show sweat and don't show stains. And I haven't figured out printing with white ink on dark shirts yet, so I've felt fairly stuck. BUT then I had a stroke of inspiration and thrifted a handful of tshirts that meet my sensory criteria, and decided to tie dye those shirts in colours that I would actually want to wear, not just automatic perfect rainbow, and I'm SO EXCITED by how they turned out.

The one I'm wearing today in fact was a shirt I thrifted, wore once, realized it showed sweat under the armpits too much for my comfort, and then ALSO managed to stain it with grease somehow after wearing it one time. But I tie dyed it with black and dark blues and now it's perfect and I'm so thrilled.

I'm planning on block printing some things on a few of the shirts and I'm sure some of them I will leave as is and just wear plain, but I do feel like I've invigorated my wardrobe a lil and it's nice to feel excited about that again.

that is an egg carton behind me on the floor, but it's okay it's not weird, it's just how I feed my dog breakfast

look at how good this spiral is! this might be the best spiral i've ever done

Halloween tie dye i mean come on why did it take me so long to think of this

originally posted August 28 2026

mental health cause and effect is on my mind again

 as in, the question of "does writing regularly improve my mood or is it easier for me to write when my mood is better?"

I'm feeling vulnerable about art stuff lately, maybe self-conscious? One of my classic forms of self-sabotage is to half-ass things and then reassure myself that if I had really tried, I would surely have succeeded and therefore, I am not a failure. So I've been avoiding writing, and telling myself that it's just because I've been stressed with life stuff. Except I now realize it's not actually because of that, it's because it feels scary. And because I still feel like I don't want to write, I am writing about that feeling. So there.

Today was a lot. A day full of many slightly stressful things, and it culminated in a comical shit show. I was sitting by the campfire with some friends and we were talking about a skunk that had been in our alley the night before, when my monster dog bless her heart, Macaroni, suddenly bolted at something and started shaking her head back and forth like she had a rag doll - except it wasn't a rag doll, it was a mother hecking skunk. We all immediately ran over and I managed to grab Macaroni and pull her away from the skunk, which dropped floppily out of her mouth onto the ground, and while I'm trying to mentally process what the heck do we do with this skunk corpse now oh my god, the stinky little rascal skunk just pops back up onto its feet and goes trotting off into the night. Mac got sprayed directly in her face, and she's got all these tiny little scritchy scratches on her snoot, but we got the stank out and it's chill now. Every part of it was hard. But it was okay, and I knew it would be okay, and that we just had to get through it and then it would be okay. And that's what happened, and on this side of it, it's kind of funny.

Look at that. When I tried to write about feelings my brain decided "fuck it, let's write about this ordeal instead", so I guess that's what we're posting today. Also this self-portrait of me as a goblin creature, why not.

originally posted August 27 2026.

Grounding prompts zine

 

download full pdf for free or pay what you want!

originally posted August 13, 2026

my diabetes nurse is retiring in september

 i've got a lot of feelings about that, but i want to make sure she knows how important and impactful she has been in my life over the last decade and change. so i made a card. i'm planning on letting the ink dry and then doing some watercolour painting to add some colour.

originally posted August 1 2026.

what if it all works out?

another work in progress i'm feeling very pleased with so far

sometimes I exist in kind of a creative frenzy where I'm so jazzed about the project or idea i'm working on that I disappear into it and can't talk about it yet because it's still too much an idea in my head, and then I finally emerge and take a breath and take a step back and look at what I've done. Today I felt delighted and proud of myself, and that's an increasingly familiar and pleasant feeling.

Originally posted July 17 2026. 

Lies Capitalism Tells Us, Volume 3

 

full pdf here - download free or pay what you want!

originally posted July 13 2026

self compassion revelation

 I was thinking about fashion experiments I did as a youth, like, this one time, probably in 7th or 8th grade, I hot glued a bunch of seed beads in a star shape on a tank top and wore it to school the next day feeling like hot shit and then when my friend saw it she was like "uhhhhh what are you wearing..." and I realized oh no I have done a mistake somehow, and she explained that it looked sloppy, the lines were uneven, the hot glue was kinda blobby, the beads were all facing different directions, it just looked jacked up for so many reasons. I felt embarrassed, stupid, humiliated by my overconfidence, and when I recall that memory, I feel that shame again. For the last couple of years, there's also been compassion for little me, for their pain in that moment. I'm confident that little me didn't deserve to feel so ashamed about this thing. But today I realized, I also feel admiration for that younger version of me. She made a craft that she was SO excited about, just so tickled by the idea that you could hot glue seed beads to a piece of clothing and then have a new piece of clothing, that she didn't pause to do quality control, and she felt like such hot shit and she believed in herself enough to immediately rock it, and that's awesome. It feels very peaceful and warm, to think about this experience that has always felt like shame, and also feel not just understanding but appreciation and admiration for the version of me that did the 'bad' thing. The shame is not gone, and I think that's important - the shame is still there, but now there's also understanding, and admiration, and compassion, and warmth, so the shame takes up so much less space. I can't make the feeling of shame not happen, but I can cultivate other feelings. I can add more good. That's nice.

Here's a photo of a table of tshirts from our garage sale this weekend - 2/3 of them are ones I printed on, and 1/3 are just used graphic tees; I sold zero tees of any kind but I still bought a bunch more plain tshirts because frankly I'm having a delightful time making shirts and the more I do it the better I'm gonna get at it, and that's cool.

Originally posted July 6 2026

works in progress

 more specifically, these are the first test prints I've made on 2 new blocks I carved, using old greeting cards for reference images and then adding my own words.

This part of the process used to annoy me a lot, because I'd carve something and I'd think, "I'm finally done carving, hurray, time to enjoy it!" and then I'd make a test print and I'd see 19 things I hated and I'd feel like I was going back to the beginning when I went back to the block to revise those things, and as that kept happening, I would feel more and more frustrated at the fruitlessness of this endeavour.

But I really like printmaking, so when I realized that was the pattern, I worked on reframing how I think about it. Instead of "hurray, I'm finally done carving!", now I think about it as "okay, I feel really good about this and I think I'm done, so let's find out what I've missed". It's like if I know the objective is to identify the areas that still need some work, then when I find areas that still need work, I feel like I've succeeded!

Reframing shit is maybe like the easiest way to instantly pull myself out of a gloomy feeling. I have yet to find a thing that's not reframeable. It doesn't fix everything, but it makes me feel better, and that helps me do whatever I need to do to fix the thing, if a thing needs fixing.

these test prints are exciting though, because i can see the shape of what I'm trying to do. I'm real jazzed to share them when they're done done.

originally posted July 6 2026

I feel better when I write more

 or is it that I write more when I feel better?

I think when I spend more time writing, I feel more like myself, and I also feel like I know myself more. Maybe writing forces me to slow down and spend time inside my own brain in a way that nothing else does. I think I'm onto something here.

anyway

I made these froggy shirts tonight and that was really exciting to do.

Originally posted June 29 2026

some works in progress

 my street is doing a community garage sale in a couple weeks and I've been working on these lil patches to sell. I carved the images and words and printed them on thrifted bedsheets, and then I'm going to fuse them with a stronger backing and add some iron on stuff to make them iron on patches, and I'm real excited about how they're coming out so far.

originally posted June 23 2026

solstice

 my house is celebrating the solstice tomorrow so i've been crafting in preparation.

originally posted June 19 2026

Lies Capitalism Tells Us, Volume 2

 

full pdf here - download free or pay what you want!

originally posted June 12 2026

physical community, ecosystem, world

 I have historically placed a lot of my self-worth in being smart. When I don't understand something I feel stupid, and that causes distress because it implies that I'm unworthy. I've worked on that a lot over the last few years cause I used to be mean to people when I felt stupid, and I didn't like that. So now that I can handle feeling stupid without freaking out about it, I've discovered I can get much more curious about myself and therefore understand myself better.

Politics has always been confusing for me, and also a thing I care very much about and want to stay aware of. I can remember in high school, people talking about like, thinking locally, and I knew both of those words, but I didn't understand what "thinking locally" actually meant in practice. Like, I'm a teenager, my whole life is just everything immediately around me, and ordering clothing from Amazon has nothing to do with local or not local, that's just clothing. Technically, I wasn't buying clothing from Amazon until I was an adult, cause that wasn't really a thing, but the general concept is the same.

I feel like a lot of what makes life hard is just how big the world is now - prior to the internet and the 24 hour news cycle and like, luxury worldwide leisure travel, each of our individual worlds was much smaller. We weren't as aware of things happening far, far away from us. Today, there's too much information being shoved at us from every corner of the planet and we can't make sense of it - there's not enough time to process everything we're being fed. We can't figure out what to prioritize or what we have the right to interfere with in far away places. We look at a vast and highly varied world through our own cultural/moral lens, because we generally don't know how not to. We're trying to paint too diverse a group of organisms with too wide a brush. We can't process the scope of the entire world enough to capture the necessary nuance, we only have this big broad brush available to us. And it's also really cool that we get to know about other cultures, we get to understand more of the breadth of the world, it's beautiful it's magical that is true, and I still think that in general, humans would be happier and more at peace if we lived more in our smaller, real-life worlds. I haven't googled that so there might be research on it that I haven't looked into, I have no idea.

I can't think of a way to change the size of everyone's world en masse, and it feels very overwhelming and hopeless, until I ask myself what I can do to make my own world smaller. I can't change everyone's world, but I can make my world smaller and test my theory.

I'm overstimulated and overwhelmed by information coming at me from everywhere, so I need to take in less information. So I delete apps. I spend time being bored, when I'm willing to tolerate that.

I don't want to feel guilty for my participation in fast fashion and factory farming, but I also want to be clothed and fed, and I don't have the kind of money that affords bougie ethically made fair trade organic sacrificial virgin sustainable clothing or meat. So I try to buy from thrift stores and to repurpose and upcycle clothing I already have, and I try and go to clothing swaps in my community. I can't remember the last piece of clothing I bought myself new - and I do not miss it even a tiny bit. I learn different crafts in order to reuse things, and that becomes not just a cool new skill but also a hobby. My wardrobe gets smaller and there's less turnover, I'm less overwhelmed by the constant accumulation of things, and I'm less worried about clothing. If I do buy something new, I will be kind to myself, because I am imperfect and things are not black and white.

One of my people hired another of my people to help with a renovationy job thing. They said something about how they really wanted to keep our money within our ecosystem as much as possible, and something about that really stuck with me. Like, wait, if I hire people from my own local community for services, I can nurture my community - and it feels really good in my heart to do that. I guess I thought this kind of change would happen after the eventual collapse of Amazon etc - like, that in the absence of fast fashion we would like, re-learn how to weave cotton into cloth and sew it together, or something. Re-invent clothing. Rediscover fire and the wheel. I hadn't considered that I can simply start living as though fast fashion wasn't an option. Asking, "if I can't buy new ready-to-wear clothing from chain stores anymore, how will I clothe myself?" - and feeling so relieved to find that there's a pretty simple answer to that question.

I find that asking myself that question repeatedly is helpful in imagining what life could look like outside of capitalism. If factory farmed meat becomes unavailable, how will I eat meat? Will I eat meat? Will I eat more expensive meat from a local butcher, just less often? Will I start butchering my own meat? Who knows, but it feels very freeing to know that I can figure it out, and that I can work towards living that way now, instead of waiting for factory farming to stop happening before I stop participating in it. It feels like hope that it doesn't always have to be like this. And the more I source things in my life from my own community, the better I feel about my community. I feel myself contributing to something meaningful, and reaping rewards from that in the form of connection, solidarity, and safety.

Side note: you know how they say "there's no ethical consumption under capitalism"? I think maybe I think that "there's no ethical consumption without contribution and balance". Like, if you only consume, if you're not contributing, then like, yeah, that does suck. Contribution is not a black and white concept, it doesn't have to take the form of like, "productivity" in the capitalistic ways we think about it. Capitalism encourages us to consume, and to consume faster and faster and more and more and not to worry about the consequences of that, and unfortunately the consequences are like in the Lion King, when Scar takes over Pride Rock and they just eat everything until the land is barren and they are starving and it's all dark and somber and moody. That's the part of the Lion King where we are. We remember the lesson Mufasa taught us earlier in the film, that everything is a circle of stuff eating each other, and everyone has to take a turn getting eaten in order for the cycle to work (I'm paraphrasing it but like, antelope eats grass, lion eats antelope, lion dies and goes back into the land and feeds the grass that the antelope eats.)

Oh boy oh boy this ended up being a much longer journey inside my brain than I intended but like, I've been typing for a long time so I think I'm gonna publish it but tbh if you are my friend and you're like "hey Emma this is not ready for public consumption yet", please feel free to share that with me 😅

On that note, I've attached a lil bonus zine here today - this is a zine I created for Stardust Community Cooperative and I'm sharing it in the theme of community. This one's a little wonky in that if you print it out, you might need to trim down the sides some because it's not quite the full 8.5x11 size!

Originally posted June 7 2026

unearthed art projects from an earlier chapter of my art journey

these are just little scraps of thrifted fabric I've embroidered onto. they make me happy. embroidery has been one of my most consistent crafts for a lot of years, although we've been taking some time apart lately while I fall down other creative rabbit holes. also, it hurts my wrists more as i age.

originally posted June 1 2026

 

I don't have many words but

but I still want to share an art.

Specifically, I want to share these completed Natalie Portmans (Natalie Portmen? Ayyy)

Version 1&2 are block printing ink, version 3&4 are block printing ink with watercolour!

ink and watercolour

ink and watercolour

block printing ink

block printing ink 

I think the watercolour version was more fun to make, but aesthetically I like them both a lot. Which do y'all prefer?

Originally posted May 31 2026

I am regulating my emotions

 My kid is having a hard time. My dogs are having a hard time. Various people I love are having hard times. I am having a hard time with all the hard times. I don't know what to do with that yet, but I feel confident that sitting and scrolling on my phone isn't helping, so I'm doing something meaningful instead. Or at least, that's the story I'm telling myself, and the story makes me feel less despondent and adrift.

My partner bid $2 on this huge desk in an estate sale auction, not realizing how huge it is and having no plan for where to put it. It turns out I kind of love it and I feel so fancy and cool sitting at it.

Soon I have a heavy scary phone call with one of my kid's support people, but I don't want to spend the next 12 minutes steeping in despair, so taking a few minutes to tidy my desk, take a photo of things that make me happy, and appreciate this view of my sleeping dog, is what emotion regulation looks like this morning.

Fun bonus: getting the desk has led to a bunch of craft supply organizing, which has led to a burst of new creative energy, and I'm real excited about some new zine ideas I've got percolating.

I'm sending as much warmth and kindness into the world as I can muster today.

Originally posted May 19 2026.

do it badly

 this story begins a million years ago on tumblr.com. I came across this post:

I thought it was the exact perfect combination of funny, political, clever, and slutty, and over the years a couple of times I tried to buy a set like this, but was never able to find one that met my parameters, so I gave up and decided I'd just make it myself.

It's been a lengthy process. Years ago, I bought a set of iron-on letters. Years after buying the letters, I separated them into the right letters to make these words. Years after doing that, those letters are contained in a sandwich bag somewhere and I've fallen deep into another special interest art form, and I decided it was time.

I chose a font and arranged the words how I liked them, printed that off a couple times at different sizes until the letters were the sizes I wanted, and then transferred the words onto linocutting vinyl stuff and printed the words on a janky pair of pj's.

I completed this project vibrating with excitement the entire time.

It looks janky. I love it. Now I have a block with these words on it and I can print it as many times as I want on as many things as I want, and I also know what I don't like about this iteration, which gives me things to problem-solve and improve on in my next iteration.

For years I've been thinking of this project. I didn't make it cute and slutty, I made it unflattering mismatched pajamas. I did the thing! My favourite piece of advice on creative endeavours is to just do the thing badly. Not do it badly on purpose, but go into it with the understanding that the first few times you do a thing, it might look bad. It might make you feel incompetent at the thing. That's okay, cause either you still have fun and then you keep doing it and getting better at it! Or you realize that you don't enjoy this enough to want to get better at it, and then you find something else to do.

I only included this photo because I liked that my phone auto-focused on Macaroni and I'm just a guy in the background with propaganda butt

Originally posted May 14 2026

a love letter to my teenage self

the first block printing experience I had was in grade 9 or 10 art class, which I took in grade 11 and 12.

Important context: I kept diaries through my teen years, and in re-reading those diaries, I've come to a new understanding of my queerness. Every few months, I'd write about how weird it was that I was attracted to women, because like, I'm totally not gay, but like, some women are just so attractive??? And then I'd make long lists of all the various women I found attractive despite my certainty that I was not like, INTO women. Natalie Portman was on most of those lists.

And then she was in this movie, Closer, where she played this manic pixie dream stripper, and said things like "lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off... but it's better if you do", and my gay little baby heart didn't know what to do with that, so I made a block print in art class of Natalie Portman from the movie Closer.

I don't know what happened to that print, because I didn't think of my art as something worth keeping, but as I've gotten into printmaking again as an adult, I keep feeling this pang for teenage me. She was so proud of that print, she hung it in her locker - I think that might have been the first time I was ever proud of myself for a creation like that, honestly.

Finding joy in making art lately, I decided to recreate that print. It's not done done yet, but I've carved my block and done some test prints, and I'm real delighted every time I look at all the work I've done. It feels kind of like I'm gently folding my 16-year-old self into a hug while saying, in a soothing tone of voice, "you big dumb homo, you are GAY", and petting her hair while she figures out what to do with that piece of information. Making this art feels warm and kind to my teenage self, in a way that my teenage self wouldn't have believed I could feel towards her, because she just assumed she was unworthy of love at her core.

Baby gay teenage Em, it's okay to be gay for Natalie Portman.

Originally posted May 11 2026

work life balance when you don't have a job job

I'm self-employed, and I have been since 2019 when I left my last "proper" job. That came after a couple years of wondering if I was just A Person Who Can't Hold Down A Job, who Lacked Work Ethic and was therefore Bad. Luckily, I'm good at being my own boss, and I've been able to get by financially, and also as a fun bonus, my mental health has dramatically improved.

But it does make things a bit murkier for me, when I'm trying to untangle what counts as work and what counts as leisure. And for whatever reason, my brain really wants to categorize everything I do as either work or leisure. Black and white.

I've been making a zine about this community cooperative I help run, and it's been such a fun process. I've gotten to combine watercolour painting, block printing, and zine-making, to create this cool piece of informative art, but my brain sure does want to discount that because "that's not art, that's work stuff".

I don't think that's fair to me, because I did work hard on this! But I also combined my 3 most favourite (currently, at least) forms of art, in support of an organization that I believe in, and I'm really jazzed about what I made. I haven't scanned it in to the computer yet, so this is just a preview of the final zine, but I'm gonna take this moment to brag a bit about what went into it:

First, I painted the background with watercolour paints, then I wrote the content and made zines happen, and finally I printed each one individually with a hand-carved logo for the co-op. It took a while and there were many troubleshooting steps. But I'm enjoying the fact that I can make a cool thing, and I can also let myself feel good about making a cool thing.

I've sort of lost the work/life balance thread in this post, because I got real excited talking about what went into making this zine. But, I guess that also speaks to the complexity of work/life balance - because I made up my job, I can decide that the scope of my job includes doing things I love doing for leisure, but that can also be a slippery slope, because sometimes doing things I love as part of my job, makes me stop loving doing the things. For now, combining things I love doing with my job has only amplified my joy. I suspect that as long as I'm in charge of my own creative endeavours, I'll continue enjoying the things, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now, I'ma enjoy enjoying my joy.

Originally posted May 11 2026

art that didn't make it into a collage

here's some art I made that I feel very delighted by but couldn't find a place to put in a collage I was working on. The strawberries are iridescent, it's important everyone knows that.

originally posted May 6 2026