A Peek Inside My Bedroom

My bedroom used to be the dining room. It had the best views of the ocean, and one day I decided that was reason enough to swap the spaces entirely — turning the dining room into a cozy, dark, boutique-style bedroom, and transforming my former bedroom into a maker studio.

I wanted the bedroom to feel like a secret. A small boutique hotel suite — quiet, intimate, and a little dramatic. A space for nesting, reading, lounging, napping, dreaming, and staring out at the water. There’s no door, just curtains, so it feels tucked away but still open to the light.

The Paint

The paint is from Clare Paint, a Black-owned, women-led company, in the shade Goodnight Moon. I built everything else around that feeling — soft, dark, moody. A Black girl sanctuary. The color does something particular in different lights: in the morning, it feels deep and still, at night, it feels like velvet. It was the first decision, and it made every other decision easier.

I did most of the construction work myself with my chop saw and brad nailer — the board-and-batten molding, the bulletin board, the general bones of the room. But the wallpaper is what the room is really about. That took something different. That took sitting with books.

Designing The Wallpaper

I designed the wallpaper myself, using Midjourney and inspired by traditional chinoiserie but reimagined entirely through the imagery and language of three novels: Sula by Toni Morrison, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

These three writers were in conversation with one another across decades, all tracing the inner lives of Black women with fierce tenderness. It felt right that their imagery should live together here, in the room where I am most myself.

The butterflies come from Sula. In the novel, Ajax releases them in Sula’s bedroom, a scene that is at once an act of love and abandonment — beauty and loss held in the same moment. I wanted that complexity on my walls. A reminder that beautiful things can contain difficult truths, and that a woman can be fully known and still not held.

The pear tree comes from Their Eyes Were Watching God. It is Janie’s first understanding of desire — she watches bees move through the blossoms and feels, for the first time, the stirring of what her life could be. Translating it into the wallpaper meant sitting with that passage until I understood not just what it described, but what it felt like. The tree isn’t decorative. It’s an awakening. That had to come through in the shape of the branches and the pears.

The purple wildflowers come from The Color Purple — from Shug, who tells Celie that it pisses God off when you walk past the color purple in a field and don’t notice it. It’s a theology of attention, of presence, of refusing to let the world’s beauty go unremarked. I think about that every morning.

Waking Up

Every morning I open my eyes to Janie’s pear tree, Shug and Celie’s wildflowers, Sula’s butterflies — characters and symbols that have lived in me since I first read those books decades ago. It’s a wonderful thing to sleep inside these stories.

From the window, I can see the sky and the ocean. The room is dark but never heavy. It feels like the inside of something meaningful — a thought, a dream, a book you return to again and again because it keeps giving you something new.

I built this room to be a sanctuary. But what I didn’t fully expect was how much it would feel like a conversation — with these writers, with these women, with some quieter, more certain version of myself.

It gives me so much joy and gratitude to wake up here every morning.

I overslept due to jet lag, was hungry, and slightly disoriented. When I walked into Jasmine’s home, she was already moving at full speed—telling stories, pulling out molds, pouring me homemade dragonfruit and fig, explaining ingredients, shifting between history and technique so quickly that I almost couldn’t keep up.

It felt less like a class and more like being dropped into a magical living archive. And somehow, in the middle of all that, we made delicious edible art.

Finding the Class

I found Jasmine through a Singapore-based platform called Seek Sophie, which curates experiences with local artists, makers, and cultural practitioners—almost like Airbnb experiences, but specifically for craft, culture, and hands-on learning.

Jasmine’s class wasn’t framed as a typical cooking class. It was positioned as a way to understand food history through objects—specifically, traditional molds used across centuries and cultures to shape sweets, cookies, breads, and snacks.

Entering Jasmine’s World

Jasmine’s home felt like a bright, cozy, sun-filled museum. Everywhere you looked, there were molds—hundreds of them—wooden, brass, hinged, double-sided, some opening like books, some huge, and some tiny. Each one had a story. Not just where it came from and how it was used, but how she found it, who gave it to her, and what it meant. She’s been collecting them for over 20 years.

She describes herself not as a chef, but as a culinary historian, and that distinction matters. Being with her wasn’t really about mastering a strict recipe—it was more about understanding the cultural meaning embedded in everyday objects. At one point, she told me:

Peranakan Culture: Flamboyant and Layered

Jasmine is Peranakan, which she described as similar to Creole culture—a blend shaped by migration, trade, and colonization. She called it “flamboyant and baroque,” and you could see that immediately in the food. Nothing was simple. The flavors were complex and layered. The colors were intentional. The forms were intricate. Even a small snack carried aesthetic and symbolic weight.

It immediately made sense to me as an artist—this idea that culture expresses itself not just in flavor, but in form.

The Molds (and Their Stories)

The most common mold in her culture is the turtle—symbolizing longevity. She had dozens of them, each slightly different, some carved in wood, others cast in brass.

But the collection stretched far beyond that. She showed me:

• A Nordic mold of a boy and a girl used as a kind of edible love gesture

• Greek bread stamps filled with religious symbolism—body, blood, apostles

• Molds with hinges, molds that pressed from both sides, molds that opened like books

Each one was a design system, a cultural artifact, a way to hold history, and a storytelling tool all at once.

Making Ang Ku Kueh (or Trying To)

Then we started cooking. Or more accurately, I tried to follow along as Jasmine moved through a process that clearly lives in her memory, ancestry, and body, not on the page. We used beautifully carved wooden molds in the shapes of roses, ducks, fish, and pears.

There were so many ingredients: tapioca starch, natural dyes from steeped Clitoria ternatea (butterfly pea) flowers, vanilla sugar, and banana leaves. She let me photograph the recipe, but it was covered in handwritten notes, adjustments, and improvisations. When I asked her how she learned to make kueh, she almost couldn’t answer. She said it was something you just knew how to do as a Peranakan.

We made four different types of Ang Ku Kueh. Two had savory fillings: peanut and salty mung bean, and two were sweet: coconut and sweet mung bean. Jasmine kept track of the fillings by color-coding the doughs with her handmade dyes.

At one point, she told me that since I lived in New York City, I could find everything I needed to make my own kueh at an Asian market. I was very skeptical and told her that my daily cooking routine often includes scrambled eggs or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

She just looked at me with pity and laughed.

A Familiar Way of Thinking

What clicked for me wasn’t just the food—it was the system.

Molds are a form of design. A way of encoding shape, meaning, and repetition into an object that can be used again and again. As someone who works across digital fabrication, 3D printing, mixed media, and handmade processes, I couldn’t stop thinking about them.

When I mentioned this to Jasmine and told her about some of my 3D printing projects, she immediately leaned in. She started talking about collaboration—about co-designing molds, and crossovers between my practice and hers.

It felt less like a casual idea and more like the beginning of something.

Eating, Slowing Down

After all that intensity, everything shifted.

The table was set beautifully with a batik tablecloth and china. The steamed kueh looked vibrant and sculptural, each resting on its own banana leaf square on a silver platter.

Her granddaughter came downstairs and joined us, though she was most interested in the dragonfruit and winter pear jelly cake Jasmine had made earlier from a Midwestern-style cranberry mold.

We sat, ate, and talked. We had sweet and savory kueh, and klepon—soft rice balls filled with molten palm sugar and rolled in coconut, served warm so the sugar melted in your mouth.

The food was incredible, but what stayed with me was the feeling of being welcomed into a space that was both deeply personal and deeply cultural.

What a privilege.

I went in thinking I was taking a cooking class. What I actually experienced was a living archive of cultural objects, a lesson in how design carries meaning across cultures and time, and a reminder that tools—especially simple ones—hold stories.

Rethinking the Classic Flower Market Poster

I’ve been obsessed with Flower Market posters for a while—the typography, the bold color, the graphic simplicity, but I didn’t always like that the same type of place and city were always centered. I started experimenting with making my own flower market posters that focus on places I have recently traveled to or want to travel to in the future.

But then one day, while watching my forever film Sinners for the 12th time, the idea of a Sinner’s themed flower market poster popped into my head. I think it was Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s award-winning cinematography with those long, wide, cinematic shots of Mississippi cotton fields that got my brain into maker mode. I started to wonder, what if a cotton flower became the subject of a Flower Market poster?

And what if it looked like it had been bitten by a vampire?

From Film Still to Moodboard

I had a specific collage process in mind that I wanted to experiment with, so I started by building a moodboard—pulling images of cotton plants, archival photos, and film stills that captured the tone I was after.

From Digital Drawing to Physical Pieces

From there, I moved to my iPad and began sketching cotton plants using Linerity Curve. I like working in vector because it lets me quickly experiment with composition, scale, layers, and color, while also preparing files that can be used for vinyl cutting, digital embroidery, laser cutting, CNC, or 3D printing

Once the vector design felt right, I exported everything to Silhouette Studio and used my trusty Cameo 3 to cut the shapes from watercolor paper.

Even though Flower Market posters are typically flat and graphic, I wanted this piece to reflect my signature process—moving between digital precision and handmade texture.

So instead of printing color, I painted every element by hand.

Painting, Texture, and Material Choices

For the painted elements, I used Beam Paints watercolors (not sponsored, I just love them). They’re handmade using Indigenous methods and natural materials (including wild rice starch), resulting in a soft, slightly textured finish that feels almost ethereal.

I cut multiple versions of each piece and experimented with different backgrounds and color variations before choosing my final set. The golden copper paint on the cotton base turned out to be one of my favorite details—it catches light in a way that doesn’t fully come through in photos. You have to see it in person.

After painting, the paper had curled quite a bit, so I pressed everything overnight between tracing paper (using my Michelle Obama book as a weight).

Once flattened, I assembled the composition using my original iPad drawing as a guide, while still leaving room for some improvisation. I used my sticker-making machine to ensure clean adhesion. I’m messy with the glue stick.

The Vampire Detail: Solving the Blood Droplets

I originally painted the blood droplets with watercolor, but they weren’t quite giving “bloody vampire bite.”

So at the last minute, I switched to hand-cut construction paper. The sharper edges and flat color gave the droplets a more graphic, intentional look—even though cutting them was tricky due to their tiny size.

Next time, I might design blood droplets digitally for the machine to cut. I also added subtle colored pencil shading to the cotton bulbs to give them a bit more dimension.

Bringing It Back to Digital

The final step was photographing the finished collage and importing it into Canva to transform it into a Flower Market-style poster.

This part always feels like a full-circle moment—starting digitally, moving into physical making, and then returning to a digital format for presentation.

Some parts of the process were slow and labor-intensive, but once the system clicked—vector → cut → paint → assemble—it became surprisingly repeatable. I’m excited to keep exploring.

What’s Next

I think this might turn into a full series of fictional Flower Market posters inspired by favorite films, books, and imagined places.

If you have ideas, I’d love to hear them.

My crafty friend Lindsay first introduced me to watercolor pencils during one of our monthly craft nights. I had always thought of drawing and painting as separate practices, but watercolor pencils sit somewhere in between. You sketch with them like colored pencils, then add water, and suddenly the marks turn into washes of color.

I got hooked almost immediately.

Building a watercolor sketch kit

Once I started experimenting, I began picking up supplies whenever I traveled. On recent trips to Japan and Paris, I found all sorts of tools that work beautifully with my new obsession—new pencils, even watercolor crayons, small brushes, and a palette designed with a rough surface so you can scrape pigment directly from the pencils and mix color.

When I got home and spread everything out on my table, I realized two things.

First, I had accumulated quite a lot of supplies. 😬 #shopaholic

Second, I didn’t want to mix these tools in with my regular drawing and colored pencils. Watercolor pencils require water, brushes, and mixing surfaces, so it made sense to keep everything for this medium together in its own little kit.

I briefly looked for organizers online, but nothing really worked. My tools were all different heights and diameters, and most organizers assume everything is the same size.

But I did really like the idea of round tubes, like paper toilet rolls, for the compartments. 🤔. So naturally, this became a small 3D printing design project.

Designing a custom organizer

First, I started categorizing everything and measuring heights and widths. Then I opened up my favorite 3D design tool, Tinkercad. In Tinkercad, I used simple round shapes to create separate tube compartments sized for watercolor pencils, crayons, brushes, and a few sketch pencils. It started to look like a cute flower blooming.

Next was choosing a filament. I thought about maybe white, but then I decided to print in one of my favorite translucent filaments, so the colors of the pencils and crayons become part of the design itself. The crystal clear filament came out looking so cool.

After printing the design on my beloved 3D printer, I filled it with all of the supplies I bought.

Now everything for this medium lives in one place, and it’s easy for me to carry around my apartment to all of the different artmaking corners.

It’s a small thing, but the organizer makes it much easier to sit down and experiment—which is exactly what I’m trying to do more of this year. I want to spend more time drawing by hand and sketching, instead of always working on the iPad or computer. Sometimes organizing your tools can be a powerful way to help commit to and achieve a new creative goal or practice.

Print or remix the organizer

If you’d like to try something similar, I’ve shared the Tinkercad file for this organizer so you can print it or remix it for your own supplies.

Feel free to adjust the compartment widths and heights. That’s one of the nice things about open source and designing your own 3D printed objects—everything can be tailored exactly the way you like.

And I’m curious:

How do you organize your favorite art supplies?

If you have a setup you love, if you remix this design, or have any questions about 3D printing, let me know in the comments. Likes, shares, questions, and comments really help other people like you discover my creative experiments, and I always enjoy hearing about how other artists, makers, and crafters organize art-making tools.

Grieving Through Artmaking

My mother, CarolynAnn, died in 2022 after living with dementia. I miss her every day.

She loved gladiolas. We gave them to her on special occasions. She loved their vibrant colors and their drama — tall stems reaching upward, blossoms spreading wide in a vase on the table. After she passed, my Auntie Yolanda filled her ofrenda with towering bouquets of gladiolas.

CarolynAnn was a maker. She taught me how to paint, sew, crochet, and knit. After she died, I kept making things to hold onto her: t-shirts printed with her photograph, candles with her image, lavender sachets embroidered with her name. While renovating my apartment, I found myself gravitating toward her favorite colors and a midcentury modern palette. I put pictures of her everywhere, but I wanted something bigger and more immersive.

Designing a Garden for Her

Around that time, I began experimenting with Midjourney, inspired by my friend Joy (her substack is The Future in Black). While learning the tool, I discovered the --tile command, which generates seamless repeat patterns.

I wondered: could I create a seamless gladiola pattern inspired by CarolynAnn?

I experimented with colorways, styles, and scale. The gladiolas were lush, painterly, and varied — and one colorway stood out. I generated both a bright and a pastel version, but the pastel palette felt unmistakably like her.

After generating the patterns, I ran them through a Seamless Texture Checker to test the repeat and experiment with scale. Once I was confident the pattern worked, I uploaded it to Spoonflower.

That’s when the project shifted.

I realized I could print CarolynAnn’s Gladiolas not just as wallpaper or fabric, but as sheets, curtains, pillows — entire environments.

A Garden on My Ceiling

I ordered a wallpaper sample and was stunned when it arrived. The colors were saturated and alive. I carried it everywhere and showed it off to all my friends and family. It looked real, and it felt like her. I immediately ordered a full roll of wallpaper and additional fabric swatches.

I made different moodboards of different spaces in my apartment. Of all the places, one space felt right: the ceiling of my hallway dressing room. A narrow corridor with closets on either side. I wanted to look up and feel her presence around me.

From Grief to Joy and Obsession

Seeing CarolynAnn’s gladiolas on the ceiling each day changed the energy of the space. The hallway became a small garden overhead. It brought me joy and a little bit of healing.

And then it became an obsession.

I printed the pattern onto fabric and made a hot yoga top. I turned it into a phone wallpaper and a desktop background. I used it as a banner in Notion. I started imagining more — a cropped top, curtains, maybe something unexpected.

What began as grief became something else — a signature pattern that made me happy and proud. It gave me another way to keep her with me.

Thanks for reading! If you’ve ever made something to help you deal with a difficult time in your life, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

And if the story of the wallpaper I made to honor my mother resonated with you, feel free to like, comment, ask a question, share, or restack. It helps my creative experiments travel a little further. 💕

3D printed buttons on hand-knit sweaters, laser-cut paper dolls, digital files turned into physical objects you can hold. I am an artist and maker who loves to mix high-tech and low-tech processes in my art-making. I’m interested in how ideas move—from mind to tool to hand to community—and how belief systems can be combined and embedded into everyday things.

That’s why I keep returning to Octavia Butler. And it’s why this Valentine’s Day, I used a high-tech process—digital embroidery on my trusty Brother PE-700—to stitch Earthseed verses into candy conversation hearts.

Octavia Butler (1947–2006) was one of the most visionary writers of the 20th century. A Black woman writing speculative fiction at a time when the genre barely made space for either, Butler imagined futures that weren’t escapist, but confrontational. She was one of the first writers to center Black life, Black culture, and Black women’s interior worlds inside imagined and even apocalyptic futures. But what makes her work endure isn’t just that she wrote Black people into the future—it’s that her futures are grounded in very old, very human questions about care, survival, responsibility, and love.

Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents

Parable of the Sower was published in 1993. The story begins on July 20, 2024. In the novel, Butler introduces a near-future United States unraveling under climate disaster, economic collapse, privatized violence, and religious extremism. Out of this chaos emerges Earthseed, a belief system built around one central truth: God is Change.

The sequel, Parable of the Talents, was published in 1998 and is set in 2032 and the decades that follow. It shows what happens when Earthseed beliefs are tested by authoritarian leadership, forced conformity, and state-sanctioned cruelty. If Sower is about imagining a new way forward, Talents is about how fiercely the world resists that change.

Together, these books feel unsettlingly familiar—rising extremism, attacks on bodily autonomy, climate anxiety, surveillance, and leaders who weaponize fear. Butler wasn’t predicting the future so much as studying human behavior under pressure and tracing the patterns we repeat.

Why Earthseed Feels So Relevant Right Now

Butler’s thinking feels expansive and futuristic, but Earthseed itself is deeply grounded. It’s not about escape. It’s about what we owe each other when everything familiar starts to fall apart.

Earthseed is not passive optimism. It’s a philosophy built for instability. It teaches that change is inevitable. Leadership matters. Kindness is strategic. Devotion must be chosen again and again, and love is grounding.

In a moment when many people feel exhausted, fearful, or disconnected, Butler’s work offers something rare: a framework for love and endurance.

Stitching the Hearts

Candy conversation hearts date back to the 19th century—small, sweet objects stamped with short messages meant to be exchanged on Valentine’s Day. They’re sentimental, disposable, sweet, and designed to carry meaning in just a few words.

Pairing them with Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents is intentional.

Earthseed itself is built from short, portable verses—truths meant to be memorized, shared, and carried forward. Turning those ideas into candy hearts transforms them into something tactile and intimate. You don’t just read them. You hold them. You give them away.

For Valentine’s Day, this pairing reframes love not as romance alone, but as commitment, belief, shared survival, and a sweet and powerful positive obsession

These are candy hearts for the end of the world—and for the people still trying to build something better inside it.

The Meaning Behind Each Phrase

GOD IS CHANGE

What it means:
This is the central truth of Earthseed, the belief system Butler created for a world in collapse. “God is Change” rejects the idea of a fixed, comforting force and replaces it with something more demanding: adaptability. Change isn’t something to fear or pray away—it’s something to shape. As a Valentine, it’s a radical kind of devotion: commitment not to certainty, but to transformation.

ALL THAT YOU TOUCH YOU CHANGE

What it means:
This line reminds us that nothing we do is neutral. Every interaction—personal, political, emotional—leaves a mark on the world and on us. Butler insists on accountability: to love, to lead, to build community is to accept mutual transformation. As a physical object, this heart completes the message—you touch it, and the philosophy becomes literal.

ALL THAT YOU CHANGE CHANGES YOU

What it means:
In a brutal world, Butler refuses the idea that kindness is weakness. In Earthseed, kindness is strategic—it reduces fear, builds trust, and makes collective survival possible when systems fail. This heart reframes compassion as an active force, not a passive one, especially during times of upheaval.

SWEET & POWERFUL POSITIVE OBSESSION

What it means:
This phrase names the fuel that keeps people going when conditions are unbearable. A “positive obsession” is not burnout or compulsion—it’s chosen devotion. Something you return to again and again that blunts pain, redirects rage, and sustains purpose. Calling it sweet and powerful insists that tenderness and strength are not opposites, but partners.

Join the Conversation

I loved reworking traditional candy heart iconography and pairing it with Octavia Butler’s prophetic language. Turning scripture into something tactile felt both playful and serious. I’m thinking about what to do next with the hearts. Maybe hand-stitch them onto a jean jacket, tote bag, or t-shirt? What would you do with them?

And what line or phrase would you stitch onto a candy heart? Tell me in the comments!

If you enjoyed reading about Octavia Butler and digital embroidery, please like, comment, or restack. It helps my little creative experiments reach more people.

The Recipe: Candy Conversation Hearts

This project is open source. Below is the full recipe so you can make your own.

Tools

• Brother PE 770 Embroidery Machine

• Embrillance Stitch Artist or Stitch Buddy

• Sharp fabric scissors

• Thread clippers

Materials

• Felt

• Stabilizer

• Thread

Steps

1. Digitize your phrase.

2. Hoop fabric with stabilizer.

3. Stitch fill + satin border.

4. Trim and clean edges.

5. Add backing if desired.

Downloads

Open Source Files
The full stitch files and templates are available here.