#62 3D-printed Notion earrings and creating for the love of it
Don't monetise all your hobbies.
And just like that, we got our first snow this season—on a particularly chilly Monday night. ❄️
I don’t recall the UK getting snow already mid-November (meanwhile, my family in the Baltics are glad it’s not them—the snow tends to stick around there and just gets in the way more as an everyday nuisance, less a country-wide emergency like here; my mum messaged me in our family group chat, “Phew, I thought it was here, I had to look outside the window to check).
Did I put on my crocs, tighten the belt of my dressing gown and head outside in our street? Of course. It’s not even that often we get snow here so I had to go outside and touch it, figuratively and literally.
But a snow-covered parking lot isn’t why I’m writing my newsletter this week.
Instead it’s to share a little about one of the most multi-faceted, creative tech people I’ve met: Amy from Gubbins Studio.
I got to say hi to Amy for the first time face-to-face during our Notion Ambassador meetup in Ireland earlier this year.
First of all, I think Amy’s business brand name already says it all:
Gubbins is a British slang word. It means assorted stuff, a collection of things, bits and bobs.
I use the word gubbins often to describe... well, anything. It's a nice comfortable word. It's good at conveying what I mean, even if it's vague and sounds a bit silly.
It also fits my style of work pretty well. One day I'll be creating new brand guidelines. The next I'll be sorting out someone's Notion workspace. And then I’ll be 3D modelling earrings for an upcoming conference. It’s a bit all-over-the-place, but it’s all helpful to the right people.
Amy delivered a lightning talk on her 3D printing adventures (with the earrings being just one of them), so I thought she’s the perfect person to ask how she blends creativity and day-to-day technical processes she brings to other businesses.
So, let’s go back a few years. Where it all started: Amy’s family home.
Both my parents encouraged me to explore in their own way. Dad taught me to think critically to solve problems. He gave me my first computer when I was 4 and when I got stuck we’d work to fix it together. And he loves to learn. I’ll visit my parents and he’ll be tinkering around with a new hobby, or he’ll show me something cool he’s built.
Amy’s mum has always been the artist. She made sure the kids have a space to be creative, while also teaching art lessons at a primary school.
As kids she was always making space for us to be creative; we'd redecorate rooms or handmake gifts to sell at the school Christmas fayre. Now that she’s retired she runs her own crafty market stall.
Both parents instilled curiosity and passion for learning—and it’s something Amy’s taken into her life today. “It was hugely impactful as a kid, and I actively nurture that mindset as an adult. I'm the sort of person who will put way too much effort into the smallest of things, but I wouldn't want it any other way,” she says.
Amy’s signature style is an amalgamation of all the creative (and technical) things she does. She says:
…I've found a style I'm comfortable in, and I default to it whenever I'm making something. Or I'll take a technique I used in one medium and apply it to another. For example I use brush markers for sketching, so now my smaller pen drawings feel very slowly and loose too.
Translating physical style to digital style is something I've been playing around with lately too. For my studio website I've been trying to make it feel like paper and pen with tapes and doodles, like I have in my journal posts. It’s trickier than I thought!
There are overlaps between digital and physical mediums, and I think they're a magical space for creative thinking.
It sounds so effortless, but balancing digital and tactile creativity isn’t easy. With Amy’s work mostly digital, it’s all too easy to lean on digital hobbies and spend hours at her desk. To shake things up, Amy makes a conscious decision to default to physical hobby over a digital one (at the moment: crocheting or journaling).
It helps to have small ongoing projects to dip into too. I'm writing this in mid November so I've already started making Christmas presents for family and friends. Having this much lead-time means I can chip away at them slowly, plus there's more time to make mistakes and start fresh if I need to!
If there’s one project folk in the Notion community would know Amy for, it’s her 3D-printed earrings featuring a Notion logo. It started out as a gift to a fellow Notion Ambassador, but soon after prompted Amy to think about the concept as a whole: what would the product look like if sold? How would it be packaged? What materials would she use?
The earrings even made it into a newspaper article. And to think it all started out with Amy simply experimenting with clay earrings and 3D printed keyrings. It’s these other playful experiments that lead you to new ideas and directions.
Understandably, plenty of people have encouraged Amy to sell her creations. But should you monetise all your hobbies?
Should your creative recharge become another responsibility?
Amy says:
And it’s not that I haven’t tried to sell things. In early 2020 I opened an illustration studio called Head and Heart. I wanted to take commissions and sell original artwork, but it turns out that creating art for money is a full time job that I don’t want to do on top of my other work. I lost my heart for drawing because everything I made needed to be marketable.
It’s taken a lot to reclaim my art for myself. To acknowledge that it’s okay to make things for the sake of it, without worrying about what others will think. And it’s done me a lot of good. I believe there are loads of things I wouldn’t have tried if I thought someone was judging the end result.
Not to say that I'm closed off to the idea of making money from my art, but I think if you come at it with that as a goal it changes how you feel about your creations. It's a personal choice and you can only do what you feel is right for you.
If you want to check out Amy’s studio, take a look on the website here.
So, what will you create that’s purely for yourself? 💛
That’s all from me this week—if you enjoyed this newsletter issue and haven’t subscribed yet, you can click the button below. I’d love to have you here! Hopefully, catch you next week.✨
One day last week, no one was around so I worked all day on a painting of my oldest granddaughter building her Japanese footbridge. The day flew. I barely ate. It was a day of joyful creativity. This week, one of my students and I happily sketched the footbridge. I suspect Claude Monet and Sir Winston Churchill enjoyed their gardens with similar enthusiasm. Now I need to wander some in the mountains.
There's no money in any of these things, but I, like you, must do them!