Episode 39 Why Mental Health is Important to Creatives with Melissa Esplin

September 15, 2021 by Carina Gardner

Have you ever wondered how to balance mental health with having a successful design career?

Today, artist and calligraphy expert Melissa Esplin joins Carina to discuss some of the ways to approach maintaining your mental health. Whether it’s getting a new pet or starting formal therapy, Melissa and Carina share their experiences.

Designing is a beautiful way to share wonderful things and fill the world with light and happiness. Just don’t forget, as Melissa says, to “put on your own oxygen mask first!”

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Download Carina’s free guide: The 7 Tips Nobody Will Tell You About Becoming a Surface Pattern Designer here: http://eepurl.com/dN2RcY
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**About Carina Gardner:**
Carina Gardner is a fabric designer, paper designer, and design educator who is passionate about helping other designers fulfill their creative dreams by teaching them her strategies for making money as a designer. She has a Ph.D. in Design and taught design at the University of Minnesota before starting Carina Gardner, Inc.

Carina Gardner, Inc design brand has been featured in dish ware, holiday decor, sewing patterns, and more. Her exclusive Design Suite Program helps creatives make money designing as they learn to design. Her programs include Illustrator and Photoshop training, surface pattern design, paper design, Silhouette & Cricut file design, and running a design business. She started the Make and Design Podcast so that she could share inspiration, stories, and experiences about design and life with crafters and designers.

Find out more at https://www.carinagardner.com
Check out her most popular program, Design Bootcamp, here: http://www.carinagardnercourses.com/designbootcamp

About Today’s Guest

Melissa Esplin is a calligraphy expert and entrepreneur who has taught thousands of people to become calligraphy artists over the last decade. She holds a B.F.A. from Brigham Young University and is an avid cyclist.

Find Melissa on her site at https://www.calligraphy.org/ and on Instagram at melissapher.

Episode 38 Your Last 90 Days of the Year

September 13, 2021 by Carina Gardner

On today’s episode of Make + Design, Carina delivers strategies on how to approach the last 90 days of a year. Even though it’s fun to start a new year with new goals, Carina finds a lot of power in starting new goals on October 1st every year.

This process helps her visualize what she would like to accomplish by the end of the current year. The momentum from the last 90 days of her year would help her hit the ground running with goals in the new year. One of the questions Carina asks when making these goals is, “How do I live my best life now?” Another big benefit to setting goals for the last 90 days of the year is that it allows you to fit family traditions into your last 90 days of the year so that you’re not only setting awesome goals but you’re also making those last 90 days memorable.

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Download Carina’s free guide: The 7 Tips Nobody Will Tell You About Becoming a Surface Pattern Designer here: http://eepurl.com/dN2RcY

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About Carina Gardner:

Carina Gardner is a fabric designer, paper designer, and design educator who is passionate about helping other designers fulfill their creative dreams by teaching them her strategies for making money as a designer. She has a Ph.D. in Design and taught design at the University of Minnesota before starting Carina Gardner, Inc.

Carina Gardner, Inc design brand has been featured in dish ware, holiday decor, sewing patterns, and more. Her exclusive Design Suite Program helps creatives make money designing as they learn to design. Her programs include Illustrator and Photoshop training, surface pattern design, paper design, Silhouette & Cricut file design, and running a design business. She started the Make and Design Podcast so that she could share inspiration, stories, and experiences about design and life with crafters and designers.

Find out more at https://www.carinagardner.com

Check out her most popular program, Design Bootcamp, here: http://www.carinagardnercourses.com/designbootcamp

Episode 37 Why We Are Not a Product of Circumstance but of Decisions

September 10, 2021 by Carina Gardner

On today’s episode of Make + Design, Carina walks us through a quote that she recently read from leadership guru Stephen R. Covey: “I am not a product of my circumstances, I am a product of my decisions.” She feels like it’s a freeing thought to be a product of your decisions because it frees you from playing the role of victim.

When we’re a product of our circumstances then we are the victim and we have zero control. Many studies show that feeling powerless makes us feel hopeless. Good decisions lead to positive changes in life, which leads to hope.

Carina also talks us through the things that she thinks about to make decisions very quickly. The worst that can happen when you make a quick decision is that you make the wrong decision. In most cases in life, we’ll have the opportunity to course correct when we need to. When we make quick decisions we are CHOOSING the kind of life we want to have. She also walks us through some of the little decisions that we can make. Little decisions turn into monumental things that teach us how to live a creative life.

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Download Carina’s free guide: The 7 Tips Nobody Will Tell You About Becoming a Surface Pattern Designer here: http://eepurl.com/dN2RcY

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About Carina Gardner:

Find out more at https://www.carinagardner.com

Check out her most popular program, Design Bootcamp, here: http://www.carinagardnercourses.com/designbootcamp

Episode 36 Favorite Paper Crafts Projects with Kelly Wayment

September 8, 2021 by Carina Gardner

On today’s Make + Design Podcast, Kelly Wayment returns to talk about some of her favorite paper crafts projects and to give general advice about how to create beautiful, intricate projects using a cutting machine like a Silhouette.

She and Carina talk about how to position tabs, when it’s a good idea to hand cut something, and where to store the projects that you create. There’s tons of inspiration and happy thoughts in this wonderful interview!
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Download Carina’s free guide: The 7 Tips Nobody Will Tell You About Becoming a Surface Pattern Designer here: http://eepurl.com/dN2RcY
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**About Carina Gardner:**
Carina Gardner is a fabric designer, paper designer, and design educator who is passionate about helping other designers fulfill their creative dreams by teaching them her strategies for making money as a designer. She has a Ph.D. in Design and taught design at the University of Minnesota before starting Carina Gardner, Inc.

Carina Gardner, Inc design brand has been featured in dish ware, holiday decor, sewing patterns, and more. Her exclusive Design Suite Program helps creatives make money designing as they learn to design. Her programs include Illustrator and Photoshop training, surface pattern design, paper design, Silhouette & Cricut file design, and running a design business. She started the Make and Design Podcast so that she could share inspiration, stories, and experiences about design and life with crafters and designers.

Find out more at https://www.carinagardner.com
Check out her most popular program, Design Bootcamp, here: http://www.carinagardnercourses.com/designbootcamp

About Today’s Guest

Kelly Wayment is a paper, vinyl, and heat-transfer crafting expert. She is also an instructor and has taught on sites like Craftsy, Michaels, and Silhouette.

Find Kelly at www.findingtimetocreate.com and on Instagram at kraftingkelly.

Episode 35 Strive For More So That Falling Short Feels Like a Win

September 6, 2021 by Carina Gardner

On today’s Make + Design Podcast, Carina talks about the power of setting really big goals. Carina’s not on camera today because she just got back from running a race! Carina compares the process of training for and running a race to improving anything in life.

If you strive for a lot more then falling short is still a win. It is better to make bigger goals because achieving half of a huge goal often puts you farther along than setting and achieving small goals. Goals need to be realistic but our dreams can still be huge! Carina’s running goal today was twelve miles and she only made it 5.5. But Carina of today ran 5.5 miles farther than Carina from five years ago who didn’t run at all. Remember where you’ve been, assess where you are now, and remember that you’re winning. For the future, make your goals just a bit bigger!

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Download Carina’s free guide: The 7 Tips Nobody Will Tell You About Becoming a Surface Pattern Designer here: http://eepurl.com/dN2RcY
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**About Carina Gardner:**
Carina Gardner is a fabric designer, paper designer, and design educator who is passionate about helping other designers fulfill their creative dreams by teaching them her strategies for making money as a designer. She has a Ph.D. in Design and taught design at the University of Minnesota before starting Carina Gardner, Inc.

Carina Gardner, Inc design brand has been featured in dish ware, holiday decor, sewing patterns, and more. Her exclusive Design Suite Program helps creatives make money designing as they learn to design. Her programs include Illustrator and Photoshop training, surface pattern design, paper design, Silhouette & Cricut file design, and running a design business. She started the Make and Design Podcast so that she could share inspiration, stories, and experiences about design and life with crafters and designers.

Find out more at https://www.carinagardner.com
Check out her most popular program, Design Bootcamp, here: http://www.carinagardnercourses.com/designbootcamp

Episode 34 How Design Process Can Get You Through The Hard Times with Jeanie Dickinson

September 3, 2021 by Carina Gardner

On today’s episode of the Make + Design Podcast, Jeanie Dickinson returns as Carina’s guest star to talk to us about how process can get you through the hard times as a designer. Jeanie likes to think about art as creativity and creativity soothed her soul during various tough periods in her life. Jeanie tells us about a time that the scrapbooking she owned burned down.

On top of that, her home was in the back of the scrapbooking store so she lost everything. Jeanie had to be rescued by the firemen and was extremely traumatized by the event. Art gave Jeanie an outlet that allowed her to process what she went through so that she could heal. On top of art, learning a new skill–in Jeanie’s case it was digital design–helped Jeanie to move on from her trauma. Carina and Jeanie have known each other for a long time and Carina has always been impressed by Jeanie’s drive to level up her talent. Jeanie gives great insight into ways that consistent effort over time leads to big results. You’ll want to check this one out on YouTube because Jeanie shows us some of her creations and explains her creative process. She gives us some great nuggets of wisdom about what she’s learned through the adversity she’s faced!

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Download Carina’s free guide: The 7 Tips Nobody Will Tell You About Becoming a Surface Pattern Designer here: http://eepurl.com/dN2RcY
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**About Carina Gardner:**
Carina Gardner is a fabric designer, paper designer, and design educator who is passionate about helping other designers fulfill their creative dreams by teaching them her strategies for making money as a designer. She has a Ph.D. in Design and taught design at the University of Minnesota before starting Carina Gardner, Inc.

Carina Gardner, Inc design brand has been featured in dish ware, holiday decor, sewing patterns, and more. Her exclusive Design Suite Program helps creatives make money designing as they learn to design. Her programs include Illustrator and Photoshop training, surface pattern design, paper design, Silhouette & Cricut file design, and running a design business. She started the Make and Design Podcast so that she could share inspiration, stories, and experiences about design and life with crafters and designers.

Find out more at https://www.carinagardner.com
Check out her most popular program, Design Bootcamp, here: http://www.carinagardnercourses.com/designbootcamp
Watch this episode as a video at https://www.makeanddesign.com/

About Today’s Guest
Jeanie Dickinson is an artist, a designer, and a businesswoman. You can find Jeanie’s blog (with links to all of her art!) here: https://jeaniesdesigns.blogspot.com/

Episode 33 Why I Created Ink Club

September 1, 2021 by Carina Gardner

On today’s episode of Make + Design, Carina tells us why the timing is perfect for launching Ink Club, an idea that she’s been thinking about for years.

Carina recognizes that designers, by nature, often work alone and may even be introverts. Although working on our own can be satisfying, sometimes we as makers, crafters, and designers want a community where we can show our work to other makers, get their feedback, and learn about additional resources for their work.

Ink Club gives you, first, resources and ideas for new projects. Each month Ink Club will give you a new Silhouette or Cricut tutorial every month, a brand new quilting tutorial every month, and an art tutorial every month, including all of the PDFs and files you need to create the projects. The second thing Ink Club gives you is community. As creatives, we need to share and show our designs to people. Ink Club has a paper crafting corner, an artist corner, and a quilting corner. It also has a sharing space and daily activities like a Member Spotlight on Mondays and Wisdom Wednesdays. Thursday Treat Day is the day when new tutorials launch. Ink Club also has monthly giveaways and prizes, as well as a library of downloads. Ink Club includes content for creatives of every field. If you’re a paper crafter then Ink Club will give you access to beginner content for sewing or watercolor painting.

So why is this exclusive group called “Ink Club”? Carina walks us through the reason: regardless of the project she is working on–a quilt, a fabric line, a Silhouette design, a scrapbooking paper line–Carina always starts her projects with paper and pen.

The purpose of Ink Club is to build up the individuals in the community and to give creatives a place to share and experience community. Can’t wait to see you there!
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Download Carina’s free guide: The 7 Tips Nobody Will Tell You About Becoming a Surface Pattern Designer here: http://eepurl.com/dN2RcY
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**About Carina Gardner:**
Carina Gardner is a fabric designer, paper designer, and design educator who is passionate about helping other designers fulfill their creative dreams by teaching them her strategies for making money as a designer. She has a Ph.D. in Design and taught design at the University of Minnesota before starting Carina Gardner, Inc.

Carina Gardner, Inc design brand has been featured in dish ware, holiday decor, sewing patterns, and more. Her exclusive Design Suite Program helps creatives make money designing as they learn to design. Her programs include Illustrator and Photoshop training, surface pattern design, paper design, Silhouette & Cricut file design, and running a design business. She started the Make and Design Podcast so that she could share inspiration, stories, and experiences about design and life with crafters and designers.

Find out more at https://www.carinagardner.com
Check out her most popular program, Design Bootcamp, here: http://www.carinagardnercourses.com/designbootcamp

Episode 32 Three Ways to Convey Feeling in Your Projects, Art and Designs

August 30, 2021 by Carina Gardner

On today’s episode of the Make + Design Podcast, Carina walks us through three ways to evoke a feeling in our design work.

Tip 1: Color. This one is obvious for a reason. Carina talks about how the use of color in a fabric line she’s been working on changes the feelings that the line conveys. When you change up color it totally evokes a different feeling.

Tip 2: Texture or the lack of texture. Sometimes when we design in Illustrator or with software a design can feel very flat. Compare this to a painting where the texture of the paints is visible. Different textures evoke different feelings.

Tip 3: Reference. Carina gives us a great example of what she means by reference by telling us the story of a vintage-feeling book she made while working on her Masters degree. The sans serif font she chose for the book did not fit the vintage feeling of the book, which called for a serif font. Reference is when something in our work evokes feelings based on the preconceived notions people have about that item in our work.

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Download Carina’s free guide: The 7 Tips Nobody Will Tell You About Becoming a Surface Pattern Designer here: http://eepurl.com/dN2RcY
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**About Carina Gardner:**
Carina Gardner is a fabric designer, paper designer, and design educator who is passionate about helping other designers fulfill their creative dreams by teaching them her strategies for making money as a designer. She has a Ph.D. in Design and taught design at the University of Minnesota before starting Carina Gardner, Inc.

Carina Gardner, Inc design brand has been featured in dish ware, holiday decor, sewing patterns, and more. Her exclusive Design Suite Program helps creatives make money designing as they learn to design. Her programs include Illustrator and Photoshop training, surface pattern design, paper design, Silhouette & Cricut file design, and running a design business. She started the Make and Design Podcast so that she could share inspiration, stories, and experiences about design and life with crafters and designers.

Find out more at https://www.carinagardner.com
Check out her most popular program, Design Bootcamp, here: http://www.carinagardnercourses.com/designbootcamp

Episode 31 Why Social Media Can Leave You Feeling Empty

August 27, 2021 by Carina Gardner

On today’s episode of the Make + Design Podcast, Carina gives some thoughts about social media and how important it actually is for a designer. Carina finds that it doesn’t matter how big someone’s following is, social media still leaves one feeling a bit empty.

One things she does is debunk the perception that having a large following equals making a lot of money. Carina has seen people with small followings make millions and people with large followings make next to nothing. She also discusses the never ending cycle of always wanting to hit the next number when it comes to followers, views, and likes. In some cases, she says, losing followers is not a bad thing.

Carina also shares some strategies for making it more meaningful. One thing that makes social media more meaningful for Carina is to have genuine interactions with people. At the end of the day, a design career is about being a designer, not being a social media influencer. Carina finds that when you focus on producing great product that the marketing and opportunities tens to fall into place.
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Download Carina’s free guide: The 7 Tips Nobody Will Tell You About Becoming a Surface Pattern Designer here: http://eepurl.com/dN2RcY
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**About Carina Gardner:**
Carina Gardner is a fabric designer, paper designer, and design educator who is passionate about helping other designers fulfill their creative dreams by teaching them her strategies for making money as a designer. She has a Ph.D. in Design and taught design at the University of Minnesota before starting Carina Gardner, Inc.

Carina Gardner, Inc design brand has been featured in dish ware, holiday decor, sewing patterns, and more. Her exclusive Design Suite Program helps creatives make money designing as they learn to design. Her programs include Illustrator and Photoshop training, surface pattern design, paper design, Silhouette & Cricut file design, and running a design business. She started the Make and Design Podcast so that she could share inspiration, stories, and experiences about design and life with crafters and designers.

Find out more at https://www.carinagardner.com
Check out her most popular program, Design Bootcamp, here: http://www.carinagardnercourses.com/designbootcamp

Episode 30 How Long Does It Take To Design A Fabric Collection?

August 25, 2021 by Carina Gardner

On today’s episode of Make + Design, Carina answers a question that she gets a lot: “How long does it take to design a fabric collection?” Carina talks through the difference between fabric lines that take a long time and lines that come more quickly.