Part 5: Handmade Books and How I Managed to Piss People Off

This is the fifth post in a series about how The Willa Workshops on willawanders.com came to be. It’s kind of a long story, and I don’t know how many people will find it interesting, but the response to my first post in this series has been very warm, so I’m just going to continue to go with that.

Part 5

So I’m going to kinda pick this story up at the point where Kellee had lit a fire under my arse, both for handmade book making and also, many months later, for starting an Etsy shop so that the books I was making didn’t start clogging up my art studio shelves.

In between those two happenings, I took a book making course from an artist that I had THE HUGEST ART CRUSH ON. I loved everything about her art and when I looked at it, it gave me some sort of happy and excited feeling. Basically, her artistic greatness inspired me to create.

After I took her course a feeling came over me: I could make 1,000 of these books and be so happy.

And remember, I was “finding my joy” and following that, as well advised by Lousie Fletcher.

So I made some more of the books/journals and I opened an Etsy shop. Any journal that I created sold within a few minutes, because by that point, I had established quite a following on Instagram.

What I did not realize was that within the course description was an instruction about not making those particular books and selling them. I don’t know if I didn’t see the legal disclaimer (it has since been moved to a more prominent place on the class web page) or if I saw it, read it and with my ADHD forgetfulness, just didn’t remember it at all. Whatever the case, the teachers of this particular journal making course were not too happy with me.

I received a cease and desist letter.

I begged and pleaded my case. I thought of all sorts of creative ways that maybe we could come to mutually agreed upon terms so that I could keep selling the journals. It was a NO GO ZONE. I needed to come to terms with this and move on fast.

So move on fast I did.

The first thing that I set about doing was my homework. I researched the hell out of handmade books and journals. I didn’t want to stop selling journals but I also didn’t want to get into some kind of bad karmic or legal situations with any more handmade book artists.

I spent months looking online, I perused published books about handmade book making, I took more classes to expand my education and joined The Handmade Bookclub. I made phone calls. I conducted interviews. DJ Pettit, one of the revolutionaries in this space, became a good friend as I worked hard to try to figure things out.

There were two things that I knew for sure:

I wanted to make a lot of handmade books, therefore I needed to sell them.

And, I didn’t want to piss anyone else off (dreams die hard).

I managed to come up with a type of book that I started calling The Willa Journal. It was a cobbled together mash up of a lot of different book styles and I added my own “flair.” I gave the books my own name because it seemed like the right thing to do.

They weren’t quite junk journals and they weren’t quite art journals. They were a mashup of the two and included a good amount of original watercolor and mixed media art.

The Willa Journals are truly incredible, if I say so myself. They really represent who I am as a person and as an artist. They sold like hot cakes and I started a waiting list. I could only finish one Willa Journal per week because I was making them custom for each client and they were very labor intensive. The waiting list grew and grew.

Uppercase Magazine published a 6 or 8 page spread all about The Willa Journals. It was so fun and satisfying to see something I loved creating celebrated like that.

I made and sold a Willa Journal each week for over a year (I think), my memory is sketchy at this point. People started asking me if I would ever be teaching an online class about the process. I considered it but it felt like a bridge too far. I didn’t know anything about filming and editing video, how to create curriculum, and the worst part of all . . .

I hated the way my hands looked on video and I for sure didn’t want to film my face. Don’t forget my decades long battle with an eating disorder and at this point, after having gone through some intense change and emotional healing, I was FAT.

To be continued . . .

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Well, this story just goes on and on. Glad you’re still with me! Please share your thoughts in the comments below.