Yesterday I opened my new etsy shop. Last week, I marked some of my pieces in my Behance portfolio as “for sale”. And am currently working to open my Spoonflower shop, so I can sell my designs there.

This has been quite the logistical operation here, as you can imagine. A few months ago I came to the realization that I was working a lot by publishing a monthly issue of my zine. I wanted – and still want – to share it for free; but I do need to monetize my efforts in some other way.

I remembered reading other bloggers’ posts debating the same questions and understood that these are growing pains many of us share. We do want to keep creating content that is fresh, new and distributed for free; but we want to see our work rewarded financially. How do we do that?

I have to say that I don’t have clear answers yet, so I turned to a designer, crafter, blogger that I very much admire, Patricia Zapata of A Little Hut. We exchanged some e-mails and with her guidance I found myself reworking – and test embroidering – some of my illustrations into embroidery patterns. As a start, I released two car patterns, but I want to increase this collection very soon.

After a lot of research, I found that most of the embroidery patterns available for purchase have a “cute” angle that I didn’t want to adopt. I wanted something closer to the spontaneity of a sketch, something like an embroidered translation of the visual language you can see in my zine.

I hope you like visiting my etsy shop and purchase a pattern or two. I thank you all for the support and help in spreading the word. Are there any illustrations you would like to see transformed into embroidery patterns?