We came to Arizona in 2013 to recreate our lives. After living our entire lives in the Midwest, we headed west to start a new life in Arizona. And boy, what a life it has become!
While Tim was all in and the driving force behind this cross-country endeavor, I was a bit skeptical. To convince me to go, Tim promised to make it work to build my life in art and collect as many chihuahuas as I wanted. It worked – I started packing! We now have 7 chihuahuas in our house. If you’d like to hear all about them, I wrote a blog post about them:
We sold our house of 25 years, packed up all our treasures, loaded 2 big U-Hauls each pulling trailers with even more stuff, recruited my son and daughter-in-law to drive one of those U-Hauls, coaxed our 4 dogs and parrot into those two trucks, and headed west. For three days. At the end of summer. And the adventure began!
The plan was for Tim to get a job and me to start painting – then go see what could be done with that painting. While I had always painted my art on literally everything, walls, doors, floors and furniture, I had never done it as an actual artist. And now I could paint all I wanted, and all those years of pent-up art came pouring out.
Now that I had all this art ready to share with the world, it was time to find where that world was. I found that world at farmers markets. I set up at every market I could get into. I met lots of new people, learned a lot, moved around, settled into a couple favorites and grew a business! Click below to read the first installment of how Zinnia Sky Studio came to be.
From farmers markets I stepped up to small weekend shows, then to bigger shows, built a website so it was easy to find my art no matter where you might be and got my cards into amazing retail locations. All the while I was doing this, Tim was putting in long hours at his job, working hard at what he did best and helping me when I got buried. My daughter moved to Phoenix and soon she was helping too. They helped with inventory crises, put up and tore down my tent and displays at shows, made sure I was fed and well rested and generally made things good on every level. My mom became the dog wrangler and hung out with them on long days.
In 2020 I lured Tim away from his job with the promise of short workdays and lots of fun (the short workdays turned out to be untrue and he’s happy to tell you he was duped!). Now instead of leaving home and being gone for all the hours of the day, he does all the important business things for Zinnia Sky Studio so that I can spend more time making art. He makes sure that there are always cards in the warehouse, he keeps all your favorite retail locations stocked, ships your orders lightning fast, so you don’t have to wait, and carries all the heavy stuff for markets and shows. Read more about Tim in the blog post below!
Zinnia Sky Studio has been built with family and supporting local. We do as much in house – literally in our house – as we can. What we know we can’t do as well as it needs to be done, we use local – or as close to it as we can. From the very first card Zinnia Sky Studio had printed, to the one you pick up tomorrow, all our cards are printed in Tucson, AZ by Betts Printing. We have used a local screen-printer artist for our tote bags, Beacon Group has sleeved our cards to help us get ready for our busiest times and a company in Phoenix makes our magnets. We occasionally source other products that we cannot get in AZ, but we are proud to say they are always in the USA.
If you’d like to read more about how Zinnia Sky Studio came to be, I invite you to read my blog.
