Note: I often write for my industry, and this is one of those such times.

Interested in hearing this post as audio?  You can do so here!

This question came up recently in a conversation with a colleague: does learning Adobe Illustrator make you a professional quilt pattern designer?*

The TL;DR answer from my chair is NOPE.

But let me dig into this a bit, because once we start digging under the hood of such deceptively simple questions, it becomes obvious that there are nuances to consider.

The Adobe Creative Suite is considered the industry standard for graphic design, and a written and illustrated quilt pattern is definitely a form of graphic design. It’s also widely acknowledged that Adobe products are powerful and thus complex, requiring a steep learning curve to gain some skill.

I lucked out on learning Illustrator. I had to do it as part of the Foundations requirements for my BA in Art, and despite a semester-long class and a fabulous professor, there were many weekends of steaming frustration until I got the hang of the little bit I know.

Emphasis on the little bit I know.

I bet I know barely a tablespoon of what Illustrator can do, but the part I need to know to design patterns, I know well, and well enough to help out my friends and colleagues at times. The rest happily remains a mystery to me.

When I first started designing quilt patterns, there were often conversations in the community about just drawing a shape in PowerPoint, exporting it to Word, patting your head, rubbing your belly, and turning around three times while hoping it would stay correctly scaled through exporting it to a PDF. And my contribution to those conversations was usually, “For the love of all things, just learn the industry standard tool because that’s gotta be easier than all these other contortions.”

Incidentally, I still advocate for learning Illustrator from the start rather than learning three other things on the way to it because burning the time to re-learn software is expensive, and you’ll never outgrow Illustrator.

But one of the things I’m aware of, after 30-plus years in this industry as both a consumer and a professional, is that for some tedious reason, people like to define irrelevant criteria by which they can justify their superiority and then use said criteria to create exclusion and bias. Using this situation as an example, it comes off like “I’m better than you because I use Illustrator and you don’t, and therefore you don’t belong.”

OUCH.

Thirty-five years ago, a different group of people argued that quilts were only “real” if they were hand-quilted. Or hand-pieced like grandma did it. To the people who still argue such points, I say to you: hand over your cell phone, your air-fryer, and the keys to your hybrid car.

Look, everything that still matters is going to evolve, so of course pattern writing is evolving, too. In my early quilting days, I remember buying patterns that were obviously library-produced photocopies with hand-drawn illustrations, and glossy photographs hand-glued to the pattern covers because that’s what was possible in 1989 when you were boot-strapping your biz.

Today’s evolution now includes several different software programs that can get you to a lovely pattern that downloads digitally on just about any device (including your phone!) or a gorgeous, commercially-produced, full-color booklet.

Skill-wise, if you hit a wall either in your capabilities or the limitations of your software, you’ll either level up your skills, your software, or your budget to pay people to make the tricky stuff for you. This is the way the human knowledge has always worked… “I don’t know something, I want/need to know it, so where can I find it, or who can I pay to deal with it?” I mean, it’s Google in a nutshell, without the creepy data mining practices.

So by all means, use EQ, Affinity, Inkscape, or Canva.

Or keep on patting your head while you wrangle with PowerPoint. If you hit a point one day where your ambitions or income are being held up by not learning Illustrator, I’m sure you’ll figure out what to do, or who to hire.

*BTW, the definition of professional is “one who follows an occupation as means of livelihood or for gain.”

To me, you are a professional pattern designer if your intent is to run a profitable business that designs and sells patterns.

The software you use to write them is irrelevant.

One of the assignments I conquered while learning Illustrator in college: Draw over a Michelangelo drawing. Took me allllllll weekend!

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Note: I often write for my industry, and this is one of those such times.  The start of a year means the announcement of new brand ambassadorships! If you’ve ever thought of applying for one, please give these thoughts a read to see if that bright shiny opportunity really IS in your best interests.

Please note that I’m NOT saying you shouldn’t do it.  I am saying you should give ambassadorships very careful thought and evaluation, especially if your time is precious!

The Company You Keep

• First of all, let’s take a look at the company: if you’re chosen, you’ll be publicly associated with them, and perhaps their other ambassadors – sort of like dating a celebrity. So it’s important to know if their values align with yours, should either of you decide to take a public stand about something.

• Contracts: yes, this arrangement should have a contract, because contracts protect EVERYONE. If the company won’t offer or agree to a contract, then you can’t guarantee the terms, and you, being the littlest player in the partnership, are the one that’s most likely to lose if issues arise.
• More contracts: the contract should ALSO outline what they are going to do for you, not just what you’re doing for them. Look… it’s exciting to be offered an opportunity, but don’t let the excitement make you ignore what YOU need from the arrangement.

Show Me The Money!

• Usually, you will not be paid for ambassadorships in the kind of currency you can use at a grocery store.
• Usually, you will receive exposure on their site and/or social media. In fact, you will probably be chosen based on your social media numbers to boost theirs, not just your design skills.

• So let’s talk about the product you might get (and note that I’m in the quilt industry so this is thru the lens of quilt related products): sometimes ambassadorships don’t get the coveted fabrics… you get the stuff that’s not selling well (in the hopes that this promo effort will boost it). It’s painful to try to pull something nice out of a ho-hum line of fabric, and the success of that will reflect on your design skills, not on a fabric line that has issues.
• OR you might have access to their entire fabric or product line, but have the limitation to using only that company’s products publicly for the duration of the ambassadorship. One colleague noted that this meant she couldn’t help promote a friend’s new fabric for a different company.
• Also, let’s talk about the cost of that fabric… to you, at retail, it might be $13/yard, but to the company supplying it at cost, it’s about $3 or $4/yd. So they’re giving you about $30-40 in fabric for a lap quilt (and you still need to supply everything needed to finish it).

• What are your skills worth? With a consensus that minimum wage should be $15/hr, let’s just say your hourly rate as a skilled sewist should be at least $25/hr (and this doesn’t take your design skill value into consideration). So you are receiving product valued at about two hours of your time, and the rest of the time you put into it is your “donation” to the project.
• If you’re receiving an expensive tool or a machine, you’ll probably have to return it once you leave the ambassadorship

Time: the Non-Renewable Resource

• You’ll be need to make things with the products supplied, often on a specific schedule. Do you have the time to dedicate to this? How does it fit with your personal/family schedule?

• How long does it take you to design something? Write it up?  Test and edit it? Sew it/quilt it/finish it? How is that stacking up against your “wages” above?
• And are you being realistic about your time estimates? Pssst… multiply it by three for a better estimate – trust me.

Social Media and Exposure

• The company will expect you to promote them on your social media and blog.
• They’ll tell you how to promote their product. But often, your arrangement will not specify what they will do for YOU. How many posts you’ll feature in.  Whether or not they are IG stories (that disappear), or if you could be the last slide in an IG carousel, etc. This is the exposure you’re working for, so it’s important to understand exactly what they’re promising.
• How much time does it take you to photo your work? Write and schedule and interact with your blog and social media posts? Make and edit videos?
• Research: Go look at their posts that promote other artists. What percentage of their following are interacting with those posts? Look at your own stats: do your promo posts get good traction, or does your following prefer something else? There’s nothing more frustrating that working hard on content that isn’t seen.

• AND remember that all social media posts are at the whim of the ever-changing algorithms.  Everything we post is becomes the equivalent of the newspaper on the bottom of the digital birdcage pretty quickly.

Adding It Up

Based on your math, the cost of your time versus the value of the exposure,  are ambassadorship a good deal for you? Would it be better to buy the yardage/product/tool you like, and make things, on your own timeline, that excite you?

And if you add up those hours for a year, is there a bigger, better project you could take on that will move your business further?

The post Should You Take Ambassadorships? appeared first on Hunter's Design Studio.

Why not taking a compliment gracefully costs you money

Interested in hearing this post as audio?  You can do so here!

How many times have you heard a woman counter a compliment with something that deflates the kind words?

In the craft industry, this means if you tell a woman her work is wonderful, you’ll be presented with an extensive list of all the perceived flaws to behold:

• “There’s a spot here where I wobbled a few stitches”
• “I ran out of the purple fabric here”
• “My points don’t match here”
• Essentially: “Here’s where I need to be more accurate, more PERFECT”

Someone just told you your art is great, and you come back with a version of “No, it’s not”

Downplaying our talents, our accomplishments, and ourselves is all wrapped up in women being taught not to take up space. But this isn’t just another version of women being cultured to dim their shine.

This is also economics:

How will we command a good price for our work when we tell people how substandard it is?

Women and their work are already underpaid. And if we keep pointing out all the places we fail to be PERFECT, we’re never going to close that wage gap.

The next time someone compliments you or your work, try this:

• “Thank you!”
• “I worked hard to make that bit perfect”
• “I’m really proud of this”
• “I won a ribbon for this!”

BOTTOM LINE: Stop being afraid to shine

The more space we take up, the more we’ll get used to doing it.

And we’ll get used to seeing more women taking up space so it’ll become more common to us (and others), and we’ll stop thinking it’s weird or wrong (because it’s NOT).

And we’ll stop giving people a reason to underpay us.

Me and my 3rd Place Ribbon at QuiltCon 2019! And it’s ORANGE!

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By now we’ve seen many organizations within the quilting industry take a publicly anti-racist stance. Some stances have been prompt and willing, some only exist through goading, some have been powerful, and some have been so carefully tepid as to essentially mean nothing.

Talk is cheap. Actions matter more, and a few days ago I witnessed an appalling and disappointing disconnect between a stance of support for diversity in my industry, and how that support played out in what should have been a minor conflict, if that.

This happened in the Facebook group of Craft Industry Alliance, a professional, for-profit organization with paid membership. As our current version of the anti-racism revolution was building steam in late May/early June after the murder of George Floyd, this organization made haste to start posting more links to black-owned businesses, and in general made a pretty good performance of being woke.

I’ll back up here and say that these groups exist for people like me (women who own craft businesses) to find peers, and they’re not generally full of chatter. They’re full of questions from members looking for solutions, and a small subset of the membership has taken the responsibility for helping others seriously. If you’ve known me a while, you know that I’m rabid about helping women stand tall in their business shoes and rise (I believe we all rise together) and I’m one of that small subset.

Another thing you need to know about craft businesses is that the people who own them usually sort of fall into it. They were passionate about a craft thing, and had a bit of business sense, and those two things got together and birthed a baby business. And like parenting, you’re doing everything by the seat of your pants for a while. You make a lot of early mistakes, like getting yourself into contracts that aren’t in your best interests once you understand the fine print.

Finding a peer business group makes you feel a little less lonely. And when you get helped by the smart and experienced members, it usually saves you a bunch of time, if not a bunch of money you might have left on the table in innocent ignorance.

I have colleagues in these groups who are helpers, like me. There are several of us, but I’m going to tell you about one in particular, Ebony Love of LoveBug Studios. She’s smart, and she’s generous with her smarts. She’s well over a decade into running her businesses successfully (note the plural on that), and she’s known for being an authority in many facets of business operations, one of them being how intellectual property is assigned, handled, and defended. In other lives she has run projects for Fortune 100 companies, so yes, as we say, she has the receipts. And in this life, she’s in the groups every day, crafting extensively detailed answers to most questions, for free.

And now, to the incident that I find upsetting:

A member sold a pattern to Craftsy some years ago, and recently tried to get the intellectual property rights to the pattern back. Craftsy (now Bluprint, under NBC) has a pretty well-proven track record of looking out for themselves before anyone else, and replied with a hard “nope.” So our disappointed member was in the group, trying to crowd-source legal advice to go fight NBC (and let’s just let that sink in, shall we… crowd-sourcing legal advice on Facebook. Hm.)

Ebony waded in to answer, pointing out that intellectual property rights get assigned forward in contracts. She noted what specific phrases around this to look for in the contract, with the conclusion that she (the pattern author) would likely not prevail in a fight but hey, go read the contract anyway. It was a typical Ebony answer: practically written, full of pertinent info, and offered freely. And probably worth about $500 in attorney dollars.

Shortly after, the post disappeared.

Those of us who contribute our time and answers to these groups make a point of periodically reminding members that, while the answers might be written to them specifically (in terms of the hierarchy of a Facebook response) they’re written for the good and education of all in general, and so leaving them standing benefits everyone. It’s why we take the time to help.

And so, Ebony sent that reminder out, again, pointing out that shutting down posts silences the contributors, and dampens discourse in the community.

And this is where it gets interesting:

Abby Glassenberg, who owns Craft Industry Alliance, made a lengthy statement about being extra kind when we respond because the tone* of our voices gets lost in the written word. Ebony pointed out that, equally, you shouldn’t make tone assumptions about the intent of people’s written words, either. The original poster, Deb Buckingham, at this point said she asked for help, not attacks, and followed that up with “I’d suggest that you don’t take things personal (sic)” – hot on the heels of her own self being personally offended by being told to read her own contract.

Whew.

And then, right after Ebony apologized for upsetting her, the admins shut off the comments on the post.

Why is this all a big deal, you ask? This is why: Ebony is a woman of color.

First, her words got deleted.

Second, she got tone-policed by two different white women, one who got her feelings hurt over competent free advice (and who seems incapable of taking her own “don’t take it personal” medicine), and the other defending the first’s hurt feelings and trying to keep it all blandly happy in the group.

Lastly, she was cut off from the opportunity to respond.

Silenced.

Apparently, frank business advice is supposed to be delivered with a side of emojis and cookies if you are a woman of color delivering it.

I called Abby Glassenberg to talk this over with her, privately and personally. Abby is a well-intentioned woman, and she’s trying to do good things with this group – all things I strongly support. But I’m under the impression from our conversation that she still doesn’t see the incredible WRONGNESS of telling a black woman to be nicer, publicly, in a Facebook group, and then silencing her.

I asked Abby if she would have treated me the same way (I’m a white woman), and she said she wouldn’t have to because I don’t talk to people “that way.” Friends, I DO talk to people that way, and I write to them that way, too. I’m known for being as blunt as a two-by-four, for not suffering fools (especially those who won’t attempt to conduct their businesses like professionals), and potty-mouthed to boot.

The issue here is that neither of these women sees themselves as racist, so they can’t see how their ACTIONS are racist. So let me state once more for the people at the back: Tone-policing a black woman in a business forum for a clear, factual, business tone is RACIST.

I feel like Craft Industry Alliance is at a critical crossroads now. Either it becomes the professional business resource the craft industry needs, or it becomes just another group where non-controversial sweetness matters more (and is policed unequally based on skin color) than being able to occasionally say the hard stuff that truly helps our membership rise as professionals. And as an aside, the first thing you need to acquire when starting a business, after your domain name, is some thick skin.

Craft Industry Alliance needs to get super clear on fixing the racist actions, and outline communication and moderation policies that specifically protect the voices of our members of color. Until this is in publicly in place, I don’t see how this space is safe or supportive for our BIPOC members.

Ebony left the group, and we all lost an incredibly valuable resource. It also makes the group less diverse, which is NOT reflective of the diverse populations our businesses serve.

I’m staying in the group, for now, in the hopes that it can pivot into the professional, diverse resource our industry needs.

Talk is cheap. Actions matter.

We’ll be watching.

* Regarding the issue of tone… tone is ALL in the mind of the reader. We decide how we will hear or read things, and we assign it an emotional tone. We often do this to support our beliefs. For example, if I think all car mechanics think I’m a dumb woman, I will unconsciously be looking for evidence of that bias in any exchange I have with one, and will probably find it so I can then get upset about it, which further validates my beliefs. Reading Ebony’s words as an attack is 100% in the mind of the reader.

All comments are moderated before publishing.

06.22.20:09.32am – edited to correct Deb Buckingham’s name

06.22.2020:11:37am – edited to link Ebony’s personal response to this incident

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