My DIY plywood market booth build

In the past year I’ve divested from the influencer game and started making art again, and a part of that process involved rethinking my business model. Since I’m not riding that corporate sponsorship money gravy train anymore (lol… TBH I never really was in the first place), I wanted to really slowly and intentionally think about how to make money in this late stage capitalist hellscape that felt aligned with my values, and also didn’t lead to burnout. As I started selling my prints, I knew I wanted to do markets and pop up shops, but I also didn’t want to dive in headfirst, guns a-blazin’ like I usually do. So I’ve been moving slower, thinking about what markets I’d want to do, and how frequently I think I could manage doing a market booth— as well as sussing out which markets/events felt like they’d give me the most bang for my buck. Setting up a booth and manning it for several hours can be exhausting, especially as an introvert.

All of that thinking and planning is finally coming to fruition this month as I’ve got my first pop-up shop on July 20th at Hive Co., then another on August 2nd at the Mom’s Night Out market. I’m super excited. Hive is actually in the same space where I held my DIY Awards Bash in 2023, so I’m super familiar with the space, love the owner Michele, and there are going to be a bunch of other really cool vendors there as well. The Mom’s Night Out market is at another favorite local business— The CoLab, which is actually where one of my first murals lives on the exterior of their cute building.

So! That means I have to actually build out the booth I’ve been planning! “But Liz, can’t you just throw a table cloth on a folding table and be good?” LOL do you know me? I do have to do everything at an 11. I’m unable to turn off this part of me, so we’re gonna dive in and build something that feels really cool, but also hopefully pretty manageable as far as set up/tear down goes.

This image is my main inspiration. I absolutely adore the look of plywood and it’s super straightforward to create two panels of hinged plywood so it covers the front and top of the folding table.

Here she is! So far I’ve done two mini markets with this set up and I’d love to figure out a streamlined way to package all the wood elements up and roll them. Everything, including the angled print holder, folds flat, so they all store neatly and in a small area, but it does take at least three trips to the car and back to bring them all in, so it’d be cool to figure out some way to package them together so I can roll them or something. More noodling for that. I added acrylic shelf things to the front of one panel, and I’ll probably add one or two more layers of that, but for now I just don’t have enough stock to justify more shelving. The acrylic shelves slide off so those aren’t in danger of breaking while I’m transporting the wood pieces.

My next addition will be fabric to cover the sides of the table. I designed this set up so I can make it 6 ft (to perfectly cover my 6ft folding table) or 8ft (with one foot of the wood over hanging each side of the folding table). The 6 ft set up uses both the 4ft and 2ft wood table covers— this is the set up I’m using in the above photos. The 8 ft set up uses two 4ft wood table covers, and if I want, I could do a 6 ft table and then utilize the extra unused 4ft cover on another table to make an L table format. Maybe that all makes sense, maybe not. Hopefully it does! Ultimately, the takeaway is that this design is pretty flexible for different set ups and booth options.

Salty Bitch block prints

I made some pickles for you.

I don’t know where the idea came from but I have a series of prints floating around in my head of foods branded with derogatory terms for women that we’ve reclaimed. What am I working on now that these pickles are printed? Hot Slut hot sauce. So if you’re not a pickle girly, maybe you’re a little more firey, hot sauce is comin’ your way soon!

This is a three-layer, three color print, which means that each color was printed separately, and each color has it’s own hand-carved linoleum block. This is my first multi-color print since college, so part of making this print was just relearning the process of registering each layer so that it aligns with the others.

In a way the current prints I’ve been making are just an exercise in having fun, making art in a way that is rooted in play, and getting my body moving in an art-making way again. Kind of like a warm-up, if you will. I would like to be making more deep and meaningful and impactful work at some point, but right now as I re-enter my artmaking space, making things that feel silly and lighthearted has been where I’m following my curiosity. So you get some silly pickles.

sold out

Salty Bitch relief print

$35.00

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Retaining Wall Mural Process | Tacoma Mural Artist

I’ve got this terrible mural client. She doesn’t know what she wants, she keeps jumping from idea to idea and giving me inspiration photos that have nothing to do with each other… it’s exhausting. Did I mention the client is me? Lol. Le sigh.

This is the problem of designing for yourself. With anything, really. As artists we’re our own worst clients sometimes. All that to say, I’ve been playing with mural ideas for my front retaining wall for months. MONTHS. But I think I finally have something pinned down that I really love.

When we bought this house we’d intended to fix it up and sell it, but plans changed and we’ve been living here for five years now. So some of the early decisions I made, design-wise, were more tame than my current style. But now, I’m really wanting to lean into a creative, artistic, and bold vibe for the house as a whole, and while most of the interior reflects that, I’m working on bringing that outside to the exterior.

This was the house when we bought it. So painfully underwhelming and neglected.

And this is where it’s at right now. I’m actually starting the process of painting the white trim black to match the body of the house (mocked up on the right), which I’m really excited about, but…if you take a look at that before photo, you can see the cinder block retaining wall along the sidewalk. That hasn’t changed. Dull, boring, meh. But it’s the perfect spot for a splash of color and visual interest!

Top is where we’re at currently, bottom is the idea I think I’ve settled on! I really wanted a way to incorporate some quotes about community, liberation, mutual aid, and the like. I have an Angela Davis quote planned for the left side section, but I’m still working out what quotes I want to put in the squiggles on the right side.

My next step is to pressure wash the cinder blocks so they don’t have moss growing out of them, then do some research into the best primer and paint to use. I’m super excited. I’ll most likely pull the mural into the gap where the stairs go, too, maybe add something cool on the riser sections?

I’ve really been working towards doing more murals and getting involved in the public art scene here in Tacoma, so I figured a great way to build my mural/public art portfolio would be utilizing my own house as a blank canvas. I’m also trying to work on playing around more stylistically. I did a lot of color blocking shapes murals in the past, which I do love, but I also want to keep playing and finding my own style and approach to mural design.

Anyway! I’ll share more as I progress on the actual install of this mural! Hopefully the weather will cool down a bit, and I’ve got a bunch of work to get done creating a booth set up for some pop up shop/markets I have coming up this summer! I have a really fun design schemed up, and I’m planning on doing the build out for that in the coming week so I’ll share more as I build!

Need a mural to take your home or commercial space to the next level? Let’s chat!

The Co-Lab Mural | Tacoma Mural Artist

One of my favorite businesses in Tacoma is The Co-Lab and the Pod Family of Businesses— Tacoma Children’s School, The Pod Works, and The Co-Lab. They’re all businesses aimed at supporting families and parents in Tacoma through childcare, education, and co-working spaces. My son, Jack, attended preschool at Tacoma Children’s School, and has spent countless hours playing at The Co-Lab while I was able to head off and run errands or do work.

When The Co-Lab opened, they did a ton of renovation work to the interior, but the exterior maintained it’s unassuming light greyish blue paint job— not really giving much of an indication of what was inside. When Natasha and Kayla approached me about doing a mural on the exterior of The Co-Lab I was thrilled. Not only because it would be an incredibly fun project to undertake, but I loved the idea of giving the outside of the building a look that would hint at the vibrant, fun, creative space that existed inside those four walls.

I started the process by brainstorming and mocking up a few different designs for mural options. We wanted to go with a colorful vibe that felt playful, but wasn’t super basic primary-colors. The Co-Lab branding already utilized a somewhat more muted but colorful color scheme, so that was our launching point. Being able to create something fun and playful really meant the world was my oyster when it came to designing, but in the end we went for a circle-based overlapping color block design, which I loved.

The install process for this mural was done by drawing it all out using a pencil., string, and level to draw out all the shapes, then it was just a matter of filling in all the colors. You can watch it come to life in the reels below!

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Honestly, I feel like more classic craftsman houses should have fun, graphic murals on the exterior. So many commercial spaces with big flat concrete walls get murals, but I love how this mural looks tucked in among all the architectural elements of this pretty classically Tacoma house.

Jack doesn’t go to The Co-Lab anymore now that he’s a bit older, but I still get to visit this mural every time I drop off a batch of orders at the post office across the street! It’s still one of my favorite projects.

Thinking about getting a mural for your space, either home or business? Amazing! I would love to chat more about the process and your mural dreams!

I deleted Instagram...

The download button on the app store already is tugging at me to reinstall. And if I'm being honest, I probably will reinstall it at some point. As much as I hate so much structural and policy elements of the app, and the way it snags you into endless scrolling, it does afford access to a community-- one I've spent over a decade cultivating.

But for all it's positive elements of community and inspiration and sharing art and ideas, I can't help but think about how we as a collective of users of that app have for years complained about how it constantly makes choices that we hate-- from updates to the algorithm that make it nearly impossible to see the folks we follow in our feeds, to their policy changes that greenlight their company being able to steal our content in order to train it's AI on our artwork.

All of this has been slowly unfolding over years, but as I think more and more about abolition and community care, this idea that we have to create what we want to see in the world comes to mind. That can be a world in which we don't need carceral systems to “keep us safe” but it can also mean a world in which we don't need a billionaires app to keep us connected. 

 And the reality is, both of those realities existed before, and can exist again, but it's up to us to build them. I often think about the nascence of blogging, before social media. I started blogging in that era of the 2000's. We built our own communities around our blogs, there were networks we created of audiences, other bloggers we connected with and organized with. We think that same thing isn't possible now because we rely on social media to do the connection and organization for us.

 Anyway-- all that to say, Instagram has seemingly put us in a place where we have to choose between building a community from scratch off of their platform, or opting into their app and all the myriad negative elements that come along with that in order to gain access to the community that already is on there. And for many small business owners and artists that's not just a thought experiment, it has real impacts on their ability to make a living selling their art or goods. 

 So where does that leave me? I know that the access to the community I've built on Instagram is deeply important, not only to my ability to make an income and support my family, but also because that's where my people are. But I'm also tired of living in a way that feels like we're stuck being pawns in a game played by billionaires who only see us as dollar signs, dependent on the scraps they allow us, endlessly complaining about the exploitative platforms they've designed.

And on top of all that, I'd like to model behavior to my kiddo that feels healthy, like not scrolling on social media endlessly. And now that school is out and he's home with me all day every day, I'd rather him watch me being creative than mindlessly opening an app on my phone.

So where will you find me? I think this means I'm going to try returning to blogging, and, you know, maybe actually launching that podcast I said I was going to launch in March 🫣. If you're here and reading this, you're already a part of my community that has detached from Instagram. If Instagram disappeared tomorrow, we'd still be able to connect because of this access via email, which is cool! 

So, where can you find me? 

• One place I'll always be is here on the blog. I own it, I own the content I post on here, there are no dumb algorithms I have to contend with, and it's free for you to access!

• Over on my newsletter. I try not to spam you with stuff in your inbox, but I'll do my best to keep you updated on what I'm up to-- maybe a weekly round up of blog posts or something like that? I'm not sure exactly what that would look like but my mental juices are percolating.

• Local events! Obviously this is only helpful for folks who live in the Seattle/Tacoma/Olympia area, but I am doing some events this summer! I'll be doing a Pop-Up shop at Hive on the 20th of July, and then I'll have a table at Moms After Dark at the CoLab on August 2nd. I also have a piece that will be featured in the Washington State History Museum's “In The Spirit” exhibit this summer starting July 21st, with the opening reception on the evening of July 20th. 

Thanks for being here! In this phase of online interaction where going beyond the easy follow click and scroll routine, investing in community via blogs and newsletters and patreons etc… it really means a lot.