Interview by DIME, Photography by Matt McElligot and Anna Tovar

This month, DIME sat down with Anna Tovar to chat about her playful, whimsical, and
oh-so-sweet line of prints. Not only are her calligraphy prints totally adorable, she is too! Read on to to learn more about this talented gal.

First of all, we love that you work under the moniker “Anna Tovar | Fine Artist”. It gives you the option to continually learn and work with new mediums. What is your all time favorite medium?

Oh, man! That’s really hard for me to pin point. My gut instinct is to say that oil paint is my all-time favorite, even though I don’t use it very often anymore. It’s my first love, and the real reason I gathered the courage to pursue art as a career. I went to UNT to study art, but wasn’t sure what I wanted to major in. It wasn’t until I took my first Drawing and Painting class that I fell in love with oils. I later took a couple of watercolor classes that also had my heart skipping beats, which makes it very hard for me to declare a favorite.

Your Etsy shop was originally heavy on the watercolor illustrations, but is now
largely filled with sweet and quirky calligraphy prints. How did you go about
making this change in your line?

I really enjoy change! I like to challenge myself by learning new mediums/crafts on a pretty regular basis. Some I just dabble in for a bit and some stick. Calligraphy stuck. I think it’s because I am still naturally coming up with new ideas, and inspiration is readily available and applicable. It’s not something that I have to force, so as long as I am coming up with fresh and new ideas, I will be creating new calligraphy pieces!

How do you decide what phrases you want to use on new calligraphy prints?
I keep a sketchbook that I write down all of the ideas and inspirations that float into my brain. The list gets pretty long, so every 2-3 months I’ll look over my design ideas as well as all of the quotes that I’ve collected, and see which ones match up the best.

Anyone who’s seen your work or your Etsy shop can immediately tell you have a great eye for design. In fact, we heard from a little birdy that a room in your house was recently featured on Apartment Therapy. What was that like?

Great! I am really into interior design, so having my son’s room featured was pretty fantastic (and validating)!

As you have a lot of your own art in your home, several pieces were highlighted in
Apartment Therapy’s feature. What has that done for your brand?
From what I can tell, not only did it give me greater exposure to a wider range of audience, but it also gave me more credibility. I think my brand instantly became more trustworthy in terms of quality, which has been a tremendous blessing. I wasn’t really anticipating any effects on my business, so that was just an added bonus!

What kind of work are you hoping to add to your line in the new year?

I have more ideas than I can realistically produce! I’m going to start experimenting with
combining calligraphy and watercolor. I love both mediums, so it only seems natural to combine the two. I also just came out with a new style of calligraphy with my “grow where you’re planted” piece. I don’t feel like I’m done with that yet, so I will be working on some more variations of that, as well!

How did you become involved with DIME?

I’ve been participating in the DIME shows for several years now. I started out selling oil
paintings and hand-made journals, and with each show I would introduce a new product. I benefited greatly from being in those first few shows since I was able to get immediate feedback from customers in that face-to-face environment. That is a big part of what helped shape where I am today. Rachel and Shelley were able to witness first-hand the evolution of my brand, so when it came time to open the shop, I was one of the vendors that they contacted. I am so incredibly grateful for their encouragement and support!

Do you have any advice for aspiring Etsy sellers or other local makers?

Done is better than perfect. If you are waiting for the perfect time, the perfect photos, the perfect anything, you will never get started. I believe that it’s better to just get started and get your name out there, and tweak things as you go. There is a lot to learn, and it can become overwhelming if you feel like you have to learn all of it before you open your shop. You can learn as you go!

You can shop Anna's beautiful work here, here and here.

The DIME Store is a shop and artist collective in downtown Denton that features art, craft, and vintage from 40+ local makers. Rachel Aughtry and Shelley Christner act as the "curators and purveyors" of the shop. When they're not at DIME, you'll find them behind their sewing machines or enjoying a margarita at The Greenhouse.

Interview by The DIME Store, Photos by Laura Jinks Jimenez

Since it is finally getting a little cooler, DIME sat down to chat with yarn-dyer extraordinaire, Laura Jinks Jimenez, of Gynx yarns to see what goes in to crafting her amazing fibers and goes about creating specific colorways (the beautiful selections colors in her gradients). Jinks' yarn is unlike anything else sold at the DIME Store and always catches your eye. Read on to learn what inspires her and how she goes about connecting with her online community to grow her business.

How did you get into yarn dyeing?

I started knitting back in 2005. I was still in high school and broke, but I had a thirst for nicer yarns than the local big box places stocked. I took to recycling thrift store sweaters I found. I could rarely find exactly what I wanted that way, so I turned to dyeing to get the colors I wanted. When I was at UNT getting my Fiber Arts degree, I started experimenting a lot with dyes and came up with some pretty cool results, and I fell in love with the process.

All of your colorways have fun and quirky names. What inspires their monikers?

My colorway inspiration comes from all over, but I think I’m most well-known for my “nerdy” colorways. A lot of my inspiration comes from anime or video games. Both anime and video games are so colorful that they often put color ideas into my head. It always makes for interesting conversation when people ask about my hard-to-pronounce Japanese names.

A recent project of mine actually has to do with cities in the DFW area. I’m working on a collection of colorways based on every city I’ve lived in, which all happen to be in the DFW region. So far I have two: Denton is “DenTOWN”, for which I drew colors I found in photos of the square, and Dallas’s “The Big D”, which is from Dallas’s nighttime skyline. I still have Mansfield, Arlington, and Fort Worth to go, so be on the lookout for those soon.

Does the colorway always follow the name, or is it sometimes the other way around?

It definitely happens both ways. I work from an inspiration photo a lot, so the name comes pretty easily that way. Other times I wake up and decide I feel like dyeing something with purples and blues, and then I decide later on if it reminds me of something. Sometimes I have zero plan, which is the most liberating, and grab random colors and start playing with no end goal in mind. I will dye off of intuition and add a little bit of this or that until it seems right, which makes for really complex color combinations. Those are often the most difficult to name.

In addition to yarn dyeing, you've built a little knitting identity for yourself by talking about your techniques in your Podcast "The Dyer's Notebook," knitting with your own yarns, and having your yarns featured in yarn clubs. How does all of this add to your business of dyeing?

I started my podcast, “The Dyer’s Notebook”, a little over a year ago as a way to chronicle my adventures in the fiber world, educate others about dyeing, and also to connect with customers on a more personal level. Through the podcast and social media, I’ve created a network of customers, viewers, and friends that just continues to grow. A lot of people find out about my business through my podcast, and at this point I’d say the majority of my regular customers are viewers of my podcast as well. While I talk about what I’ve been up to with my knitting, spinning, and dyeing, I also give a preview of what’s going up in my [Etsy] shop each week so people can get excited about it and keep checking out my shop regularly.

While I offer my own yarn clubs through my shop, I’ve also started collaborating with other people on clubs and knitting kits. I recently worked with Etsy seller littleskein and knitwear designer Laura Linneman on a sock kit that includes a club-exclusive colorway from me. I love doing collaborations like that because it gets my name out there to people who might not have found me otherwise.

Before Gynx Yarns, you had a handmade Etsy shop. How does having a “supply” shop differ from running a handmade shop? Or do you see Gynx Yarns as more of a handmade shop than a supply shop?

When I first started on Etsy in 2009, I was selling finished products, and it wasn’t making me as happy as I thought it would. In 2011 I shifted over to selling hand-dyed yarn. The “handmade” vs. “supply” question is kind of tricky though, because I see my product somewhere in the middle. Yes, yarn is technically a supply to make something else, but I feel that hand-dyed yarn is in a completely different category from commercial yarn. When you buy a hand-dyed skein of yarn, you are buying a piece of art. When you knit with that yarn, you are collaborating with that dye artist on your own project. I lean more towards “handmade” because of the artistry that goes into it.

The main difference between the business I started out with and the business I own now is the community associated with the fiber world. It is easy for me to connect with all of the people just as obsessed with knitting as I am with social media sites such as Ravelry, Twitter, and Facebook. If you think there aren’t that many people out there who knit/crochet or that people don’t get obsessed with it, check out Ravelry. It is a whole site for knitters and crocheters, and there are currently over 3 million users from all over the world. Not only have I found customers, but I’ve made a lot of friends through the fiber world. There really isn’t that kind of a community for people who just like to buy handmade goods.

Do you have any advice for aspiring Etsy sellers?

Treat is as a business from the very beginning. Figure out how to make your business legal, find out what taxes are, how you’re going to handle things like shipping and customer service. Your business will grow and evolve over time, but you have to start as you mean to continue.

Where can we shop your work and find our more about what you do?

Right now I sell online in my Etsy shop. In person, you can, of course, check out The DIME Store.

You can find my blog and podcast here.