Crawling out of the creative vacuum

I'm still here.

Unless planning a wedding counts as Creative Activity (and I posit that it does, I did a ton of design work for our wedding, which should be its own blog post), most of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 have been my very own creative vacuum.

So, what happened?

The day I published my most recent blog, the one about the Just Noise grandpa sticker, was February 16, 2024. What else was notable about that week? It was when Sean and I decided to get engaged!

Almost a year to the day from publishing that blog was our wedding: February 15, 2025. It was a lovely winter wedding with the most perfect snowfall and the best people surrounding us with love (and sick dance moves).

Leaving the dance floor after our first dance. We started dance lessons in October 2024 and our first dance was to "Waiting for a Girl like You" by fellow Rochesterians, Foreigner. Since the wedding we've continued our lessons and are halfway decent at rumba, hustle, salsa, and swing! And as I wrote in a previous blog, I believe dancing is creative output, so in that regard 2024 wasn't a total loss. Photo Credit: Broadside Visuals.

Does planning a wedding really take up that much time?

For someone like me, someone who attempts to take every single design choice to the next level, yes. I couldn't simply choose any ol' invitation design template, I had to work with a local letterpress printer to co-design custom invitation suites.

I couldn't just buy random mismatched wedding signs off of Facebook Marketplace, I had to make all of my own signage with the same typefaces that were featured on our invites.

Store-bought Valentines for our welcome party? Hell no, I designed those myself.

You want to know how far I really took this? I made sure the inscriptions on our rings were done in a specific typeface. WHO DOES THAT? Graphic designers, of course. It's both a blessing and a curse.

I even created a custom glass Gobo for our reception, not only because it seemed cool, but because the venue told me that no other couple had ever attempted it when they found out what went into making one. Challenge accepted!

Showing off my bustle – and the glass Gobo projecting my design! I think I will write a future blog about this process. Fun fact: when I made this just a few months ago, the price for a one-color glass gobo was $65.99. Now – due to tariffs I'm sure – they are $165.99. Photo Credit: Broadside Visuals.

So, was that it? The wedding?

No, there was more to 2024. Just about a month after we got engaged, I left my job at BOCES. I had accepted an offer at a small business in the private sector that was closer to home. My commute would go from almost an hour to just 5 minutes.

But between the new job and wedding planning, it was like a switch flipped. Before, I had been working through The Artists's Way and keeping up with daily journaling and weekly art dates, and those completely stopped.

I had been taking classes at Flower City Arts Center – photography, silkscreening, trace monotypes, and bookbinding – plus working on personal creative projects, and those completely stopped.

I was doing some creative work at my new job – video production, social media, design – and of course all of the wedding design tasks, but I wasn't doing anything for me.

When the path comes to an end

Toward the end of 2024, my new job and I decided to part ways. Things just weren't working for me or for the business, and we found a mutually beneficial way for me to transition out. No hard feelings.

I was able to take some time off of work and figure out what was next. It was also at this time I was able to finish a lot of the wedding planning that had been put off.

Then, I noticed a BOCES colleague post on LinkedIn that my old team was hiring. I immediately reached out to my former coworkers and put my name in the hat. In my time away, I had realized just how perfect BOCES was for me, and I had really been missing both the work and the mission. And huzzah, they took me back!

The switch flips back

Once I was back at BOCES, it was like life was breathed back into me. I've been back now about five months, and it's been better than ever. My creative output at work has been high – brochures, publications, videos, graphics, you name it – though you won't find those things on this website as I like to focus on my personal work here. I'm on the same team as before, Centralized Communications, but a different assignment (from serving a component district to serving BOCES HQ), and it's made the transition back feel fresh while bringing new challenges.

With my newfound creative energies, we easily wrapped up wedding planning. Of course credit must go to my husband for everything he did as well, because even though we'll both admit I took the lead on wedding things with my event planning and design background, he put a ton of work in as well.

Post wedding-bliss

While I generally enjoyed (and excelled at, IMO) wedding planning, I am glad to be done with it. It was a ton of work. Worth it? Yes. But I'm so happy to be on the other side just doing LIFE with Sean. About a month after the wedding we headed to Mexico for our honeymoon, which was excellent. A+. And since we've been back it's been fun settling into "normal" life and figuring out what marriage means for us, especially considering we've been together as long as we have (9+ years!). Our latest "project" is coordinating our retirement and investment accounts and really making sure we're on the right path with all of that. Those who know me IRL know budgeting (hi, Kyra!) and financial "stuff" is one of my favorite hobbies, so I've been really enjoying this and TBH was one of the biggest things I was looking forward to doing once married!

Okay so you're happy at work, happily married, but are you doing any art?!

Yes! Over the last couple of months I've gotten back on that horse. While doing my taxes this April, I realized I hadn't taken ANY art classes since early 2024. I believe the last non-wedding, non-client creative thing I did in 2024 was show my Rock & Roll HOF poster at Flower City Arts Center in Total Eclipse of the Art: 7th Annual Member's Exhibition.

I missed the Member's Exhibition this year 😪 New goal for 2025: exhibit something!

So as I did those taxes, I looked to see what was coming up and signed up for a really awesome one-day letterpress workshop with Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. It was called Bad Printing for Good Friday and my group and spent a couple hours printing one of his quotes!

The entire group with Mr. Kennedy after our April 18, 2025 workshop.

Me and my small group with our prints which quoted Amos: "It's In The Doing." Fun Fact 1: Amos teased me for leading my group into a landscape design and said, "You must be a graphic designer!" Fun Fact 2: My wedding letterpress vendor, Madelyn Posey (center), led our small group! Hi, Maddy!

There's more?

Yes! I just finished another course at FCAC called "Take Better Pictures." It was supposed to be a five-week course, but not enough people signed up (I was the only one in my section in fact), so we combined sections and ran the semi-private course over three weeks instead. We focused on shadows and highlights, leading lines and framing, and we also quickly covered color, angles, and composition.

It was a solid challenge for me to make photographs that were the complete opposite of what I do at work. At work, I'm mostly covering events, which results in a blend of candids and some posed photos. Think: capturing a keynote speaker as they engage an audience during a conference, or capturing a kid jumping over a hurdle, etc. So in my day-to-day photography, there isn't a ton of time to think about composition; I just need to capture the action as it's happening.

With our Take Better Pictures assignments, I actually had time to think about what I was doing. It was fun walking around and just LOOKING at what was around me, then thinking about what was interesting about that space.

One of the resulting photos from my Take Better Pictures assignments. I know abandoned buildings are cliché photo subjects, but this is at my work site, so I had to see what I could see! Check out my WORK page for a couple more recent TBP photo studies.

Just yesterday, I participated in the re-launch of the Flower City Arts Center Photography Collective. In fact I was leaving my final Take Better Pictures class when I ran into the facilitator of the Collective, the incomparable Mark J. Watts, who told me he was starting the group back up again. Without really knowing what to expect, I showed up yesterday and met a lot of neat local photographers and got to look at the work they shared. I didn't have time to pull together anything to share myself, but I'm excited to get something together for our next gathering in June.

Yesterday at the FCAC Photography Collective gathering. (Another photo I stole off Instagram. Sorry, and thanks, Juliana!)

Annnd what else.... I've been baking a lot and will be taking a cake decorating class with a friend soon. I'll be taking a digital letterpress class with another friend. Dance lessons continue. And I'm working on something else big which I'm not going to write about yet (teaser). But overall, things are happening, and it's exciting to be back in the creative saddle.

On a side note: Substack?

In 2023 I asked if blogs were considered dead media. And now, Substack is very big. I know it has existed for years, and it's not like it wasn't popular in 2023, but it just seems that lately, EVERYONE has a Substack.

So the question begs: should I move this blog to a Substack? Do YOU care about Substack? Surely I'd have to write more frequently than (checks notes) once a year. At one point I thought I could keep this blog updated every other week, ha! Maybe with my newfound creative juice, I can.

Let me know in the comments if you have any opinion on Substack, or other thoughts about what I've written. I realize this entire post could've been split into 5 separate posts. But, I don't have a plan when I write these, I just start to tell the story and wait to see where it goes. So thanks for reading, and welcome back, I really appreciate it!