Miller July Update 2024

Sherlock is too CUTE!

Well, another month is gone. We are planning on using August to limit our schedules and allow ourselves to recover so we can focus more on the next steps of our business. Our recovery period is ridiculously long and can’t be ignored any longer. Especially with both of us working on Trauma Therapy, we are going to need a significant amount of rest, over 3-6 months. For us, that means minimizing social contact for a while (sadly even cashiers count as a social contact which can't be completely avoided...).

We thought July would bring rest…but so much just kept happening.

We want to see our business moving forward, so to do that, we will have to do a home lockdown as often as possible in August. With possibly parts of September. We may do a more complete lockdown during winter months since we have to stay home most of the time anyway.

If we are to schedule anything, please expect it as early as September!

Thank you for your patience as we work on ourselves so we can do more.

Many of our projects are almost done or need to be shared, and our energy/time has not allowed us to work on the next steps. We have decided to hire someone (and finally have some funds) to help post what we have been up to. Since we are so disconnected with time, this is something we just cannot do. A week to us can feel like 4 hours. So we have to accept that we just can’t do this task. My little sister whom we are hiring won’t be able to start working until the 3rd week of August, so thank you for your patience as we transition to this change!

I got to spend some time with my little sister! <3 It's been too long! Next is my brother...

We are excited to show you what we’ve been up to~

Now for the updates.

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Crafty Card Collective July Artist Trading Card Event: Mixed Media

For the amount we brought, we could have easily gone for 4 hours!

Last month went extremely well! It was well attended, and everyone found something fun to try out. With Mixed Media, we played around with different paint tools, random materials as brushes, and used hot glue to create embellishments in silicone molds! There were plenty of materials and ideas to try out and so little time. Looking forward to doing this again~

Many of us played around with paints to be used on ATCs later. These will be cut up into ATCs or pieces to use on ATCs.

Crafty Card Collective August Artist Trading Card Event: +/- Space

August’s event is Positive and Negative space, an art technique that I remember being taught in elementary school (as I’m pretty sure many others have as well but don’t quite remember what it was called). Let’s bring back this idea with a little spin to it! How will you play with this theme and make it your own?

Visit us at Rainy Day Anime, August 25th from 11am - 1pm to have fun crafting with so many fun crafty people!

ATC Kits

We are still on pause for coming up with new kit designs as we juggle and transition how we do things. So you’ll mostly find S5 kits being released. If someone is willing to donate time to put together our instructional videos, we can get back to that. But for now, it’ll be minimal so we can catch up!

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Sherlock is adorable as usual. She’s been enjoying having us home more and happily following us from room to room to see what we are up to.

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Newest Shop Items!

We made new sticker designs! After more thought, we really want to invest more in our sticker art designs with no joke HUNDREDS of designs that we have wanted to turn into stickers and are sticker worthy. We are going to go through some older designs while throwing in some new ones in the process!

We finally have some funds to purchase them as stickers from StickerMule who have amazing quality stickers. We have ordered a sticker from them before and it is on Michelle's laptop, right where her right hand sits to type, so it gets rubbed frequently. It looks JUST as fresh and brand new as it did when we opened the order over 4 years ago. Their quality has been TESTED. I mean look how amazing these turned out to be!

Can you guess who designed what?

These stickers will be available for purchase in our Ko-Fi store!

Newest Artwork!

John has worked on and completed another project! He’s been on a roll this past month, trying to stick to one project and finish it before starting new ones. His latest completion? Another paper-layered art piece! He wants this to be more of his craft, so expect more ideas/designs like this to be released.

I just realized this photo isn't the final piece... He completed it a few days ago.

If you are interested in commissioning, send a message and we can help give you a quote based on what you’d like.

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These are so fun!! There is such a wide variety with each being one-of-a-kind!

Michelle is still obsessed with Junk Journals and has quite a few in process. These will slowly be worked on and released once her sister is able to keep up with posts for us. We also intend to share the videos (and possibly stream!?) of our crafting process. So you’ll get to see the journal being built at various stages. You'll also be able to purchase them at different stages: from newly bound journals to pieces that have been worked on for hours and hours.

Newest Papers!

Okay, so we didn’t quite take pictures of the newest papers, but we have been going through recycling leftover and spam papers. A lot of the donated papers (or previously used at events) have odd pieces attached that can’t be used. So we snip those off (from papers that CAN be used in this process) and blend them into new pages. Mixing spam mail, leftover pieces, old ads, old instructions, unused prints, completed note pages, and more. We will be releasing and selling individual pages as well as bound books from these pages. More on that depends on the amount of space available in the home (in progress as well, as everything is being cleaned out and/or processed at this time).

We need warm weather to do this process so trying to get as much done during this short warm season. Pictures and progress hopefully released later this month or next month.

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Random Progress

Michelle does have a photo project that can’t be released until we move. We really want to show you how much we are processing by ourselves in our small apartment. Every few weeks to months, she has taken a picture of the mess and the changes to see how much shifting and changing goes on in here. We work on various projects with little space, so we have to do a lot of work cleaning up, putting away, taking out, laying everything out, then starting just to pause and start something else and have to stack other items on top to work on the current task. For a straight week in July, Michelle just worked on cleaning and sorting through materials. This way, everything is better sorted based on observed needs over the past year and expected to be used in the future. With this improvement, we hope to lessen the time and stress during our projects.

We are also really praying for our disability paperwork to be approved quickly. John just needs his reestablished, and mine needs to make sure it correctly went to the right person on time before the deadline (I got a letter in the mail that I hadn’t sent paperwork in, having mailed it at the post office 3 days prior). Usually, my paperwork gets lost in the process, so please pray that it all goes through!

That’s all we have for this month. We had to sleep a lot or lay in bed exhausted but unable to sleep. We notice that we get about 4 hours of sleep at a time (the best during the day and waking up during sunlight). So we are going to try and split our days into shifts with 4-hour sleep periods in between our work periods. Our peak activity is occasionally around 12 am-3 am, so it would be best to allow ourselves to be awake for that as often as possible. We are really accepting that our lifestyle is extremely weird and all adjustments were/are made due to our health and sensitivities. Neither of us encountered people who live lives like we have had to or currently do.

It's fascinating how different people live who are just right next door, isn't it? What a large world.

Enough with our rambling, that's about all for now so hope to have more excitement to share in our next release!

Thanks for your time and see you then!

"Ok that is all. You may go."