I’m a PNW girl through and through, born and raised in the country south of Salem. I’m the oldest of 3 girls. Our parents raised us to be strong, independent and self-reliant and my dad, lacking sons, had me as his right-hand gal whenever there were projects to do. I’m actually quite handy with construction projects because of him! My mother (she passed away in 2013) was an artist and I got that from her. In fact, if you were on my home page, the landscape paintings were done by her. She is still my muse and was when I built my website. Some of her paintings are also hanging in my shop.
I’ve been doing graphic design since I was 16 and played competitive fastpitch softball throughout my teens and in college. I went to Linfield College, where I got a BA in Communications and Art. I was a newspaper editor, which has definitely helped with communicating with clients and writing captions…and blogs!
Since my teens, I did a lot of hair and makeup for family and friends for proms, weddings and special events. I remember not having much down time at softball tournaments growing up because I’d often be coerced into braiding my teammates’ hair between games. 😉 I’ve always had fun doing that, but my career was graphic design. I worked for a non-profit for 15 years doing creative media and communications until budget cuts in 2017 forced me to find a way to replace the few hours a week I lost. Right after I trained in PMU, my boss and I had our jobs fully cut. We are still close, though, and he actually officiated my wedding! But 2017…though it was such a hard and stressful year, losing my job was the best thing that could have happened to me because I never would have taken the risk and started my own business if I hadn’t been kind of forced to do so. I’m so grateful now!
I’m happily married to the love of my life, Owen, and we live in Vancouver. We have two amazing dogs and a cat who might be the devil and we hope to adopt sometime in the next year or two. Owen is in finance, and I’m so thankful for that because I wouldn’t know the first thing about saving for retirement without him! Our favorite thing to do is just be together doing anything because honestly, we each think the other is the funniest person alive. Dad jokes forever in our household! We are total nerds. But we do love to escape with our dogs to an air bnb or to the beach and we snowshoe a lot in winter. I’m not a fan of heat and sun. I turn into a lobster. Ginger problems. Snow all day, please. 😉
My hobbies are singing karaoke (I sang jazz for years) and fused glass these days. I actually have a glass studio in my garage. My skills with power tools, glass cutting tools, graphic design, writing and makeup have seemed to all come together for my career in permanent makeup. PMU is like power tools and makeup. It’s basically the perfect mashup for me!