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The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul.
Dieter F. Uchtdorf
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Why did I start Pretty Scrapbooks? The main push was attending the Scrapbook Expo with my friend Erin Yamashita Parkes. She was my first guidance in making my first scrapbook for my son. Then she begged me to go to the expo, which I put off and promised I would go the following year. So the following year I went and that experience was the impetus for starting my own creativity company. But read on about all the events in my life that brings me to starting a huge project.
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All through my childhood in Japan, Hawaii, Florida, and other places, I was surrounded by an atmosphere of art. My mother’s thirst for art placed me and my sisters in the midst of her projects. Wherever we lived, from air base to air base, she found art and craft classes to satisfy her creativity. We were able to learn leather crafting, enamel baking on copper, lapidary arts, oil painting, ceramics, pottery, silkscreening, batiking, tie-dying, silk flower making, metal welding, origami, rug making, weaving, crocheting, and knitting.
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My grandmother had a fabric store in Tokyo and we all became good little sewers with the ends of the bolts she’d bring us. We also had to take piano lessons and that set up my first business of teaching piano and voice in my studio: Singer’s Heart. My friend told me about the Suzuki piano teacher training at Holy Names College in Oakland, CA in the 90’s and I took all the classes, held a certificate concert, and received my certificate of piano pedagogy. While I was warming up for the concert, a classmate told me about Speech Level Singing, and I bought ‘Singing with the Stars,’ by Seth Riggs. I took lessons from Shelly Franklin and then started my progress in becoming an SLS teacher, which I did for 5 years and have now gone my own way. My studio website is:www.singersheart.com I have been very fortunate to teach so many wonderful students and meet wonderful families. I enjoy learning with them and look forward to many more years of studio teaching.
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Learning how to use software can be hard and so I took a class at Mission College on Adobe Illustrator. A studio parent, Lisa Toji-Blank is a graphic designer and she creates beautiful designs and I wanted to learn how to use Adobe like her. Knowing how to use a program still doesn’t teach you to come up with the idea, though. Still, Illustrator is such a powerful program, it would have made my life much easier when I only had Print Shop to make the programs for my son’s Eagle Scout Court of Honor. It was through Print Shop I first learned to do gradients, layering, text wraps and so on. I really wanted Illustrator so I could make compound paths with text and objects. Super great fun! I used this new skill to make the designs for my new line of stencils. I look forwarded to doing more stencils with Japanese, Polynesian, and Indian design influences. It's so exciting!
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Designing was always a love of mine, but it was fashion, not graphic. Though I was a music major at University of California at Davis, I finished my bachelors at San Francisco State University in fashion design, under the Home Economics department. My husband says I tortured the kids with my Halloween costumes I sewed for them. When my third child was 3 ½ months old, I sewed him the genie costume from Aladdin, my daughter was Jasmine, of course, my first son was Aboo the monkey, and I was the magic carpet with genie in arms. I even sewed matching Holstein patterned denim shorts for the whole family for a family reunion. MOO… In high school, I was president of the Dance club and I would sew the costumes for the dancers. I had to copy the Chariots of Fire ice skating costume for one of the dancers.
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I followed my mother’s love for delving into projects with my kids. We love Perler Beads. My perler bead projects are an indispensable tool for motivating piano students to do a “practice spot.” I would trade teaching craft classes to my kid’s friends for babysitting. We faux painted on wood, made beads with polymer clay, made plaster molds in sand, and made stick ponies. As a Cub Scout Den Leader, we made sand candles at the beach and marionettes for a puppet show.
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I am still involved in scouts, church, classes at the university, teaching in my studio, singing in a hula troop, writing songs for a cd to benefit the La France Foundation, writing my own crossover voice method book, and enjoying my family and pets. Plus I have some neat collections of cows and stars.
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