Rijacki's Workshop: Sheepski Designs DT application

My nom-di-plume is Rijacki, a name I've been using online and for my creative side for more than a decade. It's a round about reference to my 'day' name, Kate (or Kathrine, as it says on my birth certificate). Rijacki is, as I have been told, Macedonian for Shrew (which is also why I use a shrew in my logo). One of my favourite plays by Shakespeare is Taming of the Shrew. The Shrew in the play is named Katharine or Kate (the bonniest Kate in Christendom). And... so Rijacki is a reference to Kate and also an example of how I link things.

I've done many creative things in my life: costuming, jewelry making, figureen painting, resin creations, and, as I'm sure you can guess, writing. But never any purely creative endeavor as a full time occupation.

I currently am on one design team as a "resinista" writing occasional paid freelance tutorial articles for Resin Obsession (byline Kate "Rijacki" Ledum). Some examples:

I actually got into papercrafting because of my resin-ating and jewelry making. I got a Big Shot a bit over a year ago.. and then started playing with paper. Several months ago I tried using a waterbrush with Distress Ink and fell headlong into the medium that most resonates with me for colouring. I do not own any Copic markers. The only alcohol markers I have are Chameleons. I like them, but.. once I started working with water medium they started gathering dust. A few months ago I figured out how to work with digis using water medium and started gleefully adding digis to my stash.

I like mixing up the mediums, digi with physical with die cuts with whatever seems the right thing to fit in the project. My style does tend to be more CAS without an abundance of embellishments, though occasionally shabby chic is what a particular project begs to be (and so I follow it). In papercrafting, I mostly make cards but sometimes a larger project decides to compel me.

By day, or rather when I am not creating, I do software testing on industrial router-like products that use cellular data communication for WAN (and more recently WiFi and Ethernet). I've been working with this product line for over a decade, almost as long as I have been using the name Rijacki. The company I work for, Sierra Wireless, is why I am living in Canada. Over four years ago, they closed the office near San Francisco, and offered to move me to the home office in the Vancouver area. I was born in Washington state, so moving here was moving home. I am a US citizen who is a permanent resident in BC, Canada.

I have a BA in history. Both my creative knowledge and my technical knowledge are almost entirely self-taught. I love experimenting and troubleshooting (figuring out how to break things or how they got broken) in nearly equal measures. In many ways, they're similar. Decades ago, mostly when I lived in Germany, I used to do medieval style Illumination and mix my own paints using researched techniques. It's some of those techniques with added marker techniques I have recently explored that I use to colour/paint digi and stamped images. I'm still expanding my abilities and experimenting with techniques I remember but haven't used in years. The one medium I don't like using is anything with oils mostly because the smell disagrees with me horribly.

And now that I have gone on far too long.. well. this is me. I like writing, teaching, exploring new things, exploring new creative techniques, mixing techniques and mediums from a variety of sources. I'm not very good at drawing (which is why I like digis and stamps *laugh*) but have been getting better, again, at painting.

Sheepski Design image printed on vellum and painted with Distress Ink and waterbrush. Elizabeth Craft Design - Way With Words die cut in two colours slightly offset for a shadow.