at the end of the block, south of my house, has stood this stately, decrepit, old school building. you can see its gorgeous arched brick openings with its dignified keystones from my backyard (here's a photo i took the summer before i moved in looking down the alley from my yard toward the school). as years have gone by, i knew that the likelihood of the school being salvaged and made into something amazing (the type of potential you're trained to see in such lovely bones of buildings in architecture school) was decreasing by the day.

as beautiful a relic as it is, it began to cross the line from lovely and abandoned to ominous and threatening over the past months. trees rooted themselves at the roofline, their roots weaving their way down the brick facade, causing a hazard to pedestrians and cars on the street. the fenced off areas of sidewalks attracted the grossest types of litter. it became an unfortunate eyesore at street level.

finally, the city put up demolition notices. our neighborhood association scrambled to arrange a meeting with L&I and our city council representative to learn what the impact would be on us and our houses during the project. so, we're now a week into what we're told will be a 5-6 demolition. i'm posting photos of the demolition (as i happen to walk by) in this flickr set.

people often ask what the trick is to supporting yourself through a small creative business (or, we'll pretend that's what they're asking when they gawk "you can make a living doing that?" when i mention what i do for a living...).  while there is, of course, no magic tip or trick to make it easy. there are simple things you can do to make things go as smoothly as possible.

the first would be to establish genuine relationships. this probably applies not only to making a living through your handmade art or what-have-you, but also just to, you know, life in general (but i won't claim to be any expert on the matter of "life in general", so i'll stick to blogging what i know...)

• customers - because without them, cheesy as it might sound, you don't have a business. this might sound obvious, but i think people forget this sometimes. so be real. be relate-able. be honest. give them your best. it'll pay off.
• 'employees' - you might not have people on the payroll (dream as you will), but it probably takes more than you to make your business work. the people who make your venues run, who manage the boutiques or shops that carry your work, the bloggers who feature your products... it's really important to not only communicate well with these people, but being consistently easy to work with, helpful, useful and just plain friendly can be the most important thing you do for your business.
• the 'competition' - the truth is, you don't have 'competition' unless you decide those other sellers are your enemies instead of your friends. which is just silly. be consistently honest, open, original and level-headed and things will fall into place. share something you learned with another seller who asks your advice or when you fall in love with someone's work, let them know - no one gets tired of hearing that people like what they do. these are the seemingly casual relationships that not only make work more fun, they really add up to more than the sum of their pieces.

mid-printing for a couple wholesale orders i recently shipped, i realized i was running dangerously low on hang tags (do they count as hang tags if they don't really hang? they just sort of lay on top of most of my work... lay tags?). luckily i remembered that my friend and studio-neighbor, jeff, prints all kinds of beautiful things on his fancy schmancy photo printers, and so i whipped together a new tag design and we printed them up. 

i'd always wanted to customize tags for a few of the fun places that sell my work, so i was incredibly pleased with the results. yay!

ored of typographically dull blog posts? look no further. the perfect cure for the fonts that ail you, daily drop cap is a blog that posts a superfun new capital letter goodie each (work)day. what is a drop cap, exactly? well, it's when you take the first letter of a paragraph and you enlarge it (and usually make it quite ornate) so that it drops down two or more lines (as seen on the left at the beginning of this paragraph). drop caps are often used to begin works of fiction, or, if you're feeling fancy, you can use a drop cap to begin a special blog post.

superfun, right? totally. the blog is a side project for jessica hische, and she's posted each weekday since september 2009. according to her website, the project will go through approximately 12 cycles of the alphabet (yay!). enjoy!