Sustaining Craft - Episodes Tagged with “Business”

Episode 21: Joshua Kurtz: Socializing through World Building

Elizabeth Silverstein — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 14:00:00 -0500

Joshua Kurtz joins Elizabeth Silverstein of Sustaining Craft for a follow-up interview.

Over the years, Joshua has found that simply asking might lead to unexpected results, like when he asked his drama teacher if the school could perform the musical he wrote at age 17. Or when he needed to raise his rates as a professional Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master.

“I realized at that point, ‘Huh, I’m a very niche market, this is a very niche market, I’m not charging enough for my services,’” Joshua explained. “And it’s hard, because I’m asking people to come back over and over and over again, and I’m asking an audience and it’s mostly kids. But I did wind up raising my rates, which got very little resistence. Everyone was very supportive, especially when I said why.”

As of January 2020, Joshua is a full-time dungeon master, teaching Dungeons & Dragons and other table-top role-playing games to audiences of all ages.

Find more of Joshua’s work:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/dndforhire/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/dndforhire/
Website - https://dndforhire.com/
Email - dndforhire@gmail.com

Sustaining Craft is a passion project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Music provided by Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends).
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sustainingcraft/
Facebook - http://facebook.com/sustainingcraft

Find more from Hew&Weld:
Website - hewandweld.com/news
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hewandweld/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/hewandweld/

Special Guest: Joshua Kurtz.

Episode 20: Hannah Allen: Putting Petal to the Metal

Elizabeth Silverstein — Fri, 29 Nov 2019 11:00:00 -0500

Hannah Allen stumbled into the flower industry with a customer service job. “I had no intention of touching flowers whatsoever,” Hannah said. “Only because my manager was just like, ‘This is your job. Don’t expect much.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, sure, fine.’ I was young and dumb, so I was like, ‘I’ll just do whatever. Just give me a paycheck.’”

Then the head florist, Marie, asked her for some help. “She got really overwhelmed one day and she was like, ‘Come on over,’” Hannah said. “She was drilling me on the flowers, on what’s what, I had to label them. She taught me all the basic arrangements that I needed to know.”

Marie was transferred, and Hannah became head designer at the shop.

She’d always loved weddings since she was young. As the flower girl at the weddings of her mother’s friends, Hannah was determined to do the best job she could. When a bride came into the shop looking for affordable wedding flowers, Hannah remembered how much she loved weddings. “A girl came in looking for cheap wedding flowers on the fly,” Hannah said. “My manager handed me this big binder full of wedding information on all the questions you need to ask and all this stuff. And he was like, ‘Here you go. You can do it.’ I was like ‘Oh, ok.’ Having that sit down with the bride and getting excited and talking about what we’re going to do for her wedding was what ignited that, I think. I had this entire trade-style crash course on how to have a wedding consultation. That’s where it started, I think. It was the wedding stuff.”

In 2018, when she decided to “go rogue” as she described it, she started with Hannah Allen, Flower Gal. Then came Petal to the Metal Floristry. “I was just making an Instagram post one day, and I was just like, ‘Everything is going so fast, it’s petal to the metal.’ It just clicked in my head. It was the best pun of all time for a flower business.”

Find more of Hannah's work:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/petaltothemetalar/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/petaltothemetalar/

Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Everything is funded through partnerships with friends. Music provided by Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends).
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sustainingcraft/
Facebook - http://facebook.com/sustainingcraft

Find more from Hew&Weld:
Website - hewandweld.com/news
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hewandweld/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/hewandweld/

Special Guest: Hannah Allen Anderson.

Episode 19: Michael Eubanks: Using Art to Combat Fear

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 16:00:00 -0500

Michael joined the military at the age of 16. By the age of 31, with a three-month-old daughter, Michael was let go from the military in what the armed forces calls a reduction in strength. He was sent back to the United States with his family, with no understanding of life as a civilian for the past 15 years.

“I panic," Michael explained. "I experience a lot of stress. We were trained to not recognize stress. We didn’t talk about stress. We didn’t talk about trauma. So you’re outprocessed--in other words, you come through this process of coming back to what we call ‘the block.’ And I would say you try to hold your head up, you try to be proud. You try to be an adult. You try to play the male role but you are in a nether world. Even though you’re back with the family that birthed you and raised you, you’re back with a whole different mindset, a whole different paradigm of what life’s about, and you are disconnected. You suffer from disassocation disorder. You’re out of your element, your’re out of your sphere. You don’t know what to do.”

Michael graduated with honors from the UA Little Rock Masters Social Work program with a concentration on community and family therapy. He works as an education specialist in a program at UA Little Rock with an office from the Department of Education. He also plays once a month in Hot Springs and performs several times a month for veterans with dementia, VA staff, and veterans in the day health care program.

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Find more of Michael's work:
Website - www.michael-eubanks.com
Email - meubanks@michael-eubanks.com
Arkansas Arts Council Directory - https://www.arkansasarts.org/aie-artists/michael-eubanks
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/michael.eubanks.315
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-e-eubanks-71800043/

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Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Each episode is only possible with the help of friends: Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends) and Joshua Kurtz.

Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/sustainingcraft

Find more from Hew&Weld:
Each episode of Sustaining Craft comes with a companion article - hewandweld.com/news
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/hewandweld/
Facebook Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/1355556997945302/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hewandweld/
Podcast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sustainingcraft/

Special Guest: Michael Eubanks.

Episode 18: Jessica and Justin Crum: Proving That Creative Careers Are Possible (But Difficult)

Elizabeth Silverstein — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 15:00:00 -0400

Jessica and Justin Crum decided to move to Conway in 2014, where Justin began working for PBS creating documentaries. He created educational documentaries, included one that aired nationally. But with little room to grow, he decided to take a step back into the scripts he’d written previously. “My roots are very much in narrative filmmaking,” Justin shared. “And I did grow to love documentaries there, I didn’t want to only do documentaries, and there’s no way to branch out from that there with PBS, really, unless you’re Downton Abbey. I just felt it was the right time to move into other scripts I had written before and start producing those. PBS was a bit of a training ground for me in a lot of ways and built my confidence up. I left there with the intention of making the film I’m making now, which is Papaw Land. I’ve been working on that for a year and a half. And it’ll probably be another year or so. It’s a long process.”

And Jessica tried to continue her career as a fashion designer. She was freelancing for her contacts in LA and started saying yes to other projects. “When people locally would say, ‘What do you do?’ I would say I’m a designer,” Jessica explained. “I would tell them textile design, fabric design, graphic t-shirts, and they’d go, ‘Oh! Could you make my logo?’ I was like, ‘Probably.’ I’m a yes person, so I was like, ‘Yes, of course I can,’ and then secretly I was like, ‘I’ll figure it out.’”

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Find more of Jessica's work:
Silverlake Studio Website - https://silverlakestudio.com
Silverlake Studio Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/teamsilverlake/
Silverlake Studio Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/teamsilverlake
The Studio Downtown Website - https://www.thestudiodowntown.com/
The Studio Downtown Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/thestudiodowntown/
The Studio Downtown Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/thestudiodowntown

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Find more of Justin's work:
Papaw Land Movie Website - https://papawlandmovie.com/
Papaw Land Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/papawlandmovie/
Papaw Land Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/papawlandmovie
Papaw Land Twitter - https://twitter.com/papawlandmovie
Papaw Land Land Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1546893063/papaw-land-movie-filming-in-arkansas-summer-2018

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Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/sustainingcraft

Find more from Hew&Weld:
Each episode of Sustaining Craft comes with a companion article - hewandweld.com/news
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/hewandweld/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/hewandweld/
Podcast Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/sustainingcraft/

Special Guests: Jessica Crum and Justin Crum.

Episode 17: Matthew Castellano: Building Community Through Art

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 16:00:00 -0500

When the gallery was in danger of closing, Castellano decided he would take on the project. He started raising money and planning pop-ups, absorbing the risk. “I didn't want to bring anybody else down,” he shared. “I wanted to do it pretty much on my own back. I did the GoFundMe for it and I had a lot better response than I thought I've ever had. So I have to do it now. Yeah, it's like yes, okay, I get to do it and have to do it. … It's really the community.”

He’s also built an educational element into the gallery, sharing the smaller details of working with galleries, like making sure a name is on the back of every art piece, resumes and portfolios are up-to-date, and that every “no” hits hard, but each “yes” makes up for it. “I've been rejected more times than I've been accepted but I was accepted a few times and that makes all the difference,” he said. “I want to be the person that I didn't have.”

Each artist accepted into Gallery 360 walks away learning how to work with other galleries as well. “Everyone that gets to show here is going to learn how to be an artist by the end of their show,” Castellano said. “That way, they are stronger about going into other places and being represented. A lot of times, gallerists and people that represent don't want to have to deal with people that don't know. It's a lot of work on their end. if they come in and they're completely perfect, then they have nothing but good roads ahead of them. So even the smallest things like not putting information on the back of the piece is detrimental sometimes because you never know if that could be a sale or if you're never gonna see that piece again because it can get lost.”

Find more of Matthew's work:
Art Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/matthewcastellanoart/
Gallery Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/lr_360/
Gallery Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/360Gallery/
Website - https://manvswheel.bigcartel.com/
GoFundMe - https://www.gofundme.com/gallery360
Ultraviolet - https://www.facebook.com/events/824094007942154/

Sustaining Craft is a project of Hew&Weld Writing. There are no fees for artists and craftspeople to participate. Everything is funded through Hew&Weld and partnerships with friends: Jim Ciago (Seven Second Chance on iTunes and Spotify & Nomad Neighbors in the Denver area most weekends) and Local. Magazine (http://localmag411.com/).

Find more from Hew&Weld:

Each episode of Sustaining Craft comes with a companion article, which can be found at hewandweld.com/news.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter: @hewandweld
Sustaining Craft is also on Instagram: @sustainingcraft

Special Guest: Matthew Castellano.

Episode 16: Kathryn LeMaster: Using the Unseen to Craft a Home

Elizabeth Silverstein — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 13:00:00 -0500

And that interest had started years ago, with a family project. LeMaster’s father, gifted in construction, decided to build their family home from the ground up. The family lived in a mobile home while they first built a barn to house all of the building materials, and then started on the house a few years later. “I kind of felt like i grew up on a construction site,” LeMaster said.” I loved so much of that process of building our house and being able to be so involved in that process. Hanging doors, helping my mom pick out wall paper and paint colors.”

After graduating with her degree and working for a year and a half at a local firm as an intern and then a junior designer, LeMaster decided to take a break. She joined her mother again, helping her flip a house as LeMaster considered what her next step might be.

She didn’t intend to start a company.

Get more of Kathryn's work:
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/kjlemaster/
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/kathrynjlemaster/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/kjlemaster/
Website - https://kathrynjlemaster.com/

Find more from Hew&Weld:

Each episode of Sustaining Craft comes with a companion article, which can be found at hewandweld.com/news.
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter: @hewandweld
Sustaining Craft is also on Instagram: @sustainingcraft

Special Guest: Kathryn LeMaster.

Episode 12: Katie Childs: Problem Solving with Photographs

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 12:00:00 -0400

Now, Katie Childs photographs over 30 weddings a year, along with family portraits. In 2018, she booked 35 weddings, but hopes to reduce to 20 yearly. That may prove challenging--she’s already booked 14 weddings for 2019. Childs also started working with the Arkansas Times this year, traveling to farms for Food and Farm, and working on family-based shoots for Savvy. Savvy has brought projects that have been familiar due to her previous work, while Food and Farm offers opportunities to learn additional photography skills. “We’ll do the farmer’s portraits and try to pull a story from their farm and situation,” Childs explained. “With the cattle and corn, I’m just doing a documentary kind of style. A lot of the time, with these shoots, I don’t get to choose what time of day or what situation the cattle or the corn is going to be in. So it might be in the middle of the day. I’m trying to make the best use of whatever’s happening. And that is its own specific challenge, but I love figuring things out like that, it’s kind of my favorite thing. If it were super easy all the time, I don’t think I’d enjoy doing it. I like being thrown into a situation and having to figure it out.”

Special Guest: Katie Childs.

Episode 11: Geovanni Leiva: Roasting Romance Back into Coffee

Elizabeth Silverstein — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 16:00:00 -0400

Geovanni Leiva missed his family and his village, and then, after a visit five years ago, while flying back to Arkansas, he came up with an idea. “It was probably the worst three hours of my life because I would feel so defeated,” Leiva said. “And I would feel so helpless. … Why me? Why, out of all these people, I get to do this? Over one of those trips, I’m reading a magazine, and I have my little napkin for my Sprite, and I see a Chinese proverb in a magazine that says, if you give a man a fish, you will feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you will feed him for a lifetime. And I realized that exactly had happened to me. I had been given that opportunity. I had been given that chance to-- not only I was fed for one day, but I was actually given that opportunity. I realized, that’s exactly what I gotta do in my village. What if? And it started with that. Why if, why not? Why do I not bring their coffee, they grow coffee already. That’s what’s they’ve been doing for 60-plus years, ever since I’ve known them. What if I can get their coffee in the hands of my friends and family in the states? And then all of a sudden, I bridge the two, and while bridging the two, we break poverty? I was like, that’s it.”

Want the full article? Head on over to www.hewandweld.com for more.

Special Guest: Geovanni Leiva.

Episode 10: Diane Harper: Exposing Boogeymen with Ink Blots

Elizabeth Silverstein — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 22:00:00 -0400

Harper’s parents met while her father, Hal, was stationed overseas--her mother was French. They became a military family, with Harper the middle child of three. “I was a sick kid a lot and I grew up overseas in the military,” said Harper. “Just past toddler age in Berlin, when the Berlin wall was up, and things were pretty heated for the Cold War at the time. And I think my boogeyman was born in Berlin. Everything had barbed wire. There were armed guards everywhere, and so it was just kind of a terrifying place through a five-year-old’s eyes, but you don’t really have the vocabulary to deal with that. And then to be a sick kid in a military hospital with mostly adults around you, not a children’s hospital. It was kind of an unfriendly place. And there were noises at night and things like that, and my father was a police officer. so I knew there was danger and boogeyman out there but I didn’t have a vocabulary for it, so even as an adult I have a hard time coming up with that vocabulary, but I don’t have a hard time coming up with a visual vocabulary to describe it. And by allowing them to come to surface from my subconscious, it kind of allows me to embrace them in a different way as an adult and kind of be playful with them and be grateful that I had such a vivid imagination from the way we lived and grew up. I lived in the heart of fairy tales. We traveled in Bavaria and the Black Forest was around there, and the birthplace of Hansel and Gretel. And all of these kinds of bizarre folktales that we grew up with that were basically cautionary tales to children to mind their moms, but it was kind of a wonderful place.”

There are a few ways to find Diane's art in person: she'll be at Art on the Creeks in Rogers, Arkansas on Sept. 29; she'll have some work in the Fiber Arts Show on Nov. 2, and at the Gallery 26 Holiday Show. She also has a booth at South Main Creative.

Special Guest: Diane Harper.

Episode 8: Tabatha Reeves: Storytelling with Candle Scents

Elizabeth Silverstein — Mon, 10 Sep 2018 13:00:00 -0400

And they keep their product lines interesting, even taking special orders. “We have these really unique niche scents in some of our candles, so they work really well for historical reenactors, but they’re not going to sell to somebody else,” Reeves said. “We have a state park that we contract to that deals with historical reenactors all the time, and one of their properties on the park is a jail. We designed an entire line of candles just for their jail, scents that would have been in a jailhouse in the mid-1800s to early 1900s when it was operational.”

One of those specialty scents is called The Sheriff. “It kind of smells like this dirty man that’s been smoking a pipe,” Reeves explained. “When I smell it, I get the thought of the cowboy with his feet up on the desk, and the big sheriff badge and a hat over his face, sleeping while his prisoners are in the cells behind him. That’s what it conjures for me. Many of our scents are like that. You can smell it and you can conjure this idea of what it is supposed to be in your head.”

But not everyone can smell the candles. “A lot of men can’t smell,” Reeves explained. “I didn’t realize this until I started dealing with men on a regular basis. Men, blue-collar workers, a lot of them can’t smell because they’ve worked around chemicals their whole life. Or they’ve worked around major smells their whole life. My dad is a maintenance man at a roofing plant. My dad can’t smell anything. Asphalt’s burned the inside of his nose. So he can’t smell candles. My dad can’t smell when something is cooking. And he’s not the only one.”

Special Guest: Tabatha Reeves.

Episode 5: Suzanne Godbold: Baking the Perfect Sugar Cookie

Elizabeth Silverstein — Mon, 20 Aug 2018 11:00:00 -0400

When Long moved to Florida, Godbold and Cook divided the remaining responsibilities. While they at first tried splitting the baking and the decorating, they found the workflow wasn’t efficient. Cook, who has a degree in business, took over the finances, taxes, and practical business needs. Godbold took on all of the baking, decorating, social media, and marketing.
Along with refining her baking skills, Godbold learned that her customers weren’t on Instagram or Facebook. “At the beginning, I was trying to do paid ads and do all these things and market on Facebook but that really doesn’t sell for this market,” she explained. “Most of my customers didn’t find me on Facebook. It was word of mouth or they tried our cookies at someone’s event. Once I figured that out, it took a lot of stress off of social media. Social media is just fun. It’s a fun case to showcase our art and product and meet people.”
Referrals turned into regular customers, and they also started selling cookies at the Me and McGee Market, a stand dedicated to local produce, meats, cheese, products, and crafts.
“When we first started marketing, it was a little bit of a struggle trying to find who our customer is,” shared Godbold. “Who would appreciate what we do and who is looking for what we were offering because we’re not trying to compete with Walmart. We’re not even trying to compete with some of the other local storefront bakeries. You can’t call me up on a Tuesday morning and say, ‘Hey, can I have three dozen decorated cookies by this afternoon?’ It’s not going to happen because I need at least three days. It took a little bit, but once we really found our customer base, who understands us, they understand what we put into it. They know that I’m a stay-at-home mom and that I do this from 8 pm until midnight or sometimes later during the week. They appreciate our work and are willing to pay for what we’re offering.”

Special Guest: Suzanne Godbold.

Episode 4: Brittany Oaks: Painting the Miracle of Birth with Light

Elizabeth Silverstein — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 13:00:00 -0400

Brittany Oaks made a few friends in Conway while a single mother and was invited to a home birth. “It was really, really incredible to see,” Oaks said. “And I’d given birth by that point myself. But this was an unmedicated home birth. She started out in the water and ended up going to her bed. And just the raw power and just the fact that she invited only those people she wanted there was really, really interesting to me. That’s who was in that house and I was invited. And someone threw me a camera while she was pushing and the rest is history. I was just in love with it. This is a story, and I want to tell this story. I want to capture these sacred moments because there are a lot of things worth capturing in life - momentous moments, but to me in that time, it made it really clear to me. I spent a lot of money on my wedding photography. The wedding was annulled. I can’t show those photos or care about them because you know. But it doesn’t matter what happened with that child. When you take photos of that new human being born, that’s always your child, no matter what happens. There’s nothing that’s going to annul that.”

Oaks soon remarried into the military and was stationed overseas. Unable to work, Oaks practiced her photography skills, homeschooled her three sons, and traveled with her family. “But I knew when we got back to the states, I wanted to hit the ground running,” Oaks explained. “I knew what I wanted to do. So I did. We got back in August last year and I immediately filed for my business, got insurance and all the stuff that makes a business. … I knew what I wanted and I’ve been hustling ever since to make it happen.”

Special Guest: Brittany Oaks.

Episode 3: Melissa Diller: Using Drama to Build Confidence

Elizabeth Silverstein — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 08:45:00 -0400

Melissa Diller at first transferred her Verizon job and then quit and started Drama Kids, a franchise that has existed for the past 30 years. “We teach educationally-based drama to all school-aged kids,” Diller explained. “Basically all we’re doing is building confidence in public speaking through fun drama activities so that kids have the confidence to be whatever they end up being, whether it’s a doctor, or stage performer, actress.”

Working with a franchise framework still meant that Diller had to develop her business from the ground up, building relationships, growing her outreach, and finding business mentors. “As a business owner, you have to think outside the box, and my mentors were the ones who really taught me that,” Diller shared. “[It’s] thinking outside the box, [and] not listening to the voice inside your head that says ‘really?’”

Special Guest: Melissa Diller.

Episode 2: Joshua Kurtz: Bringing Dungeons and Dragons to the People

Elizabeth Silverstein — Tue, 31 Jul 2018 20:00:00 -0400

Kurtz formalized his efforts into D&D For Hire this summer. “The idea of D&D For Hire is to bring Dungeons and Dragons to people who don’t otherwise have the opportunity,” Kurtz explained. “And usually that winds up being children who would want to play but don’t know how or even some adults who just don’t have people to play with. The idea is you can bring them a game and it could be a one-time off, once a week recurring thing. It’s a fun experience for anyone and if you’re a kid and you want to this extracurricular thing, it can be fun and educational at the same time.”

As for what a Dungeon Master does, well--Kurtz guides the journey. “I set the questions that they have to answer,” said Kurtz.

He knows the rules of the world, the enemies, the setbacks, and the allies. “All I know is how the world is going to respond to them, and all the problems they’re going to face is something that they have to have to deal with,” Kurtz shared. “Everyone handles that in a different way. Some groups of people will just attack every problem head-on and that works for them, and some people want to sit back and think about it first. It’s a world without limits that we are creating together.”

Special Guest: Joshua Kurtz.