The Program I Never Close
It is difficult for me to remember a time when Photoshop wasn't part of my everyday life. Like most modern people, I tend to have about a million internet tabs open at once, usually split between Safari and Chrome, along with more programs and apps than my computer probably appreciates, and Photoshop is always one of them.
I use it to edit photographs, create graphics for websites and social media, crop images, prepare artwork for printing, build compositions, and occasionally create entire pieces of artwork, like the collage I made for the Berried Alive song Zen. At this point, I use Photoshop so instinctively that I rarely stop to think about when I learned it.
But there was a time when I didn't know how.
If I had needed to edit a photograph or create a graphic back then, I probably would have paid someone else to do it. I had no idea that learning this one program would eventually become part of the foundation for nearly every creative business Charlie and I would build together.
Strangely enough, it started with faux fur, sawtooth picture hangers, beads, and a problem with the strings on Charlie's guitar.
An Idea We Kept Coming Back To
In 2014, Charlie and I were living in a little one-bedroom apartment in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. We had only been married for a few months, I was finishing my MFA while working at an insurance agency, and Charlie was working at a factory that produced elaborate prom themes and backdrops.
I had also become increasingly obsessed with making jewelry.
It had started as a way to earn a little extra money while Charlie was touring with his band, because despite what people sometimes assume about touring musicians, bands at that level often don't come home with much money. Charlie usually came home having lost money. We began making resin pendant necklaces for the band to sell on tour, and somewhere along the way, what had begun as something practical became a genuine creative passion.
I loved combining resin charms, pendants, beadwork, bright colors, sparkly materials, and unusual little objects into jewelry that was often colorful, playful, and slightly over the top.
Around the same time, Charlie and I returned to an idea we had been discussing for years. I wrote previously in my Journal Why Fruit?: On Core Memories, Building Worlds, and Collaborating with Your Spouse about the night in 2010 when Charlie and I stayed up talking until morning and came up with the name Berried Alive. That wasn't the only idea born from those late-night conversations.
Charlie had been frustrated by the buzzing created by the strings between the bridge and tuning knobs on the headstock of his guitar. The unwanted resonance affected the clarity of his playing and tone, and he was convinced there had to be a simple way to muffle it.
For years, the idea remained one of those things we talked about occasionally without doing much about it. By 2014, my growing collection of jewelry supplies finally gave us a reason to experiment. So we went to the craft store and bought some extremely fluffy faux fur.
Learning Through Prototypes
The fur was only the beginning. We still needed something that could hold it securely against the guitar strings, and eventually the answer appeared in a hardware store.
Sawtooth picture hangers.
They were approximately the right width for the guitar neck near the bridge, the small lips on either end could help brace the piece against the neck, and they already had two holes where nails would normally go. Those holes gave me somewhere to attach jump rings and build a decorative chain around the back of the guitar.
It was a strange little combination of materials, but it worked well enough to make us believe there was something there.
Then came the prototypes.
We experimented with different glues, fur thicknesses, hardware, chains, beads, and closures. The first versions used lobster claw clasps, which were awkward to fasten behind a guitar neck. Regular felt wasn't thick enough to properly muffle the strings, while the faux fur we had chosen was much too fluffy, so every piece had to be trimmed by hand. Our apartment was constantly covered in tiny pieces of fur.
Eventually, we discovered that a magnetic clasp was much easier to use than a lobster clasp. We refined the amount of fur, figured out which adhesives held everything together, and experimented with different decorative elements for the chains. Charlie tested each version on his guitars, telling me what worked and what needed to change, while I kept adjusting the construction.
By 2015, we had something we were proud of. Charlie had Muffle Cuffs on his guitars with different bead combinations designed to coordinate with their paint and hardware, and more importantly, the product solved the problem we had originally set out to solve. It muffled the unwanted string noise and gave him the cleaner tone he had been looking for.
Now we needed a name.
Giving the Idea an Identity
The name came during another late-night conversation when we both should have been sleeping.
We kept talking through the product's function. It muffled sound, it wrapped around the neck of the guitar almost like a piece of jewelry, a bracelet, a cuff.
Muffle Cuff.
We went to sleep feeling very pleased with ourselves.
At the time, Charlie's job at the prom-decoration factory had unexpectedly given him access to another skill that would become far more important to our lives than either of us could have known. He had befriended one of the designers there, who introduced him to the basics of Adobe Photoshop.
When we needed a logo for Muffle Cuffs, Charlie asked him if he would help us create one. He designed the logo and showed Charlie more about how Photoshop worked in the process, then Charlie came home and taught me what he knew.
From there, we started experimenting.
I began using Photoshop almost immediately for the resin jewelry I was making, cropping and preparing images for pendants and slowly learning what else the program could do. There was no grand plan behind learning it. I simply had things I wanted to make, and Photoshop gave me another way to make them.
That pattern has followed me through almost every chapter of my creative life since.
Building Our First Brand Together
With a product, a logo, and an increasing number of color combinations, Muffle Cuffs became our first real business together.
We had a one-color version of the logo printed on a T-shirt, created an Instagram account, and began selling the pieces through the Berried Alive Bandcamp store. I made different versions using beads and metal finishes designed to coordinate with different guitar colors and hardware.
Then we started reaching out to guitarists Charlie knew around the world.
We called them sponsored artists, and we would send them Muffle Cuffs to use, photograph, and hopefully share with their audiences. Before long, we had built a small roster of guitar players whose photographs we shared across our Instagram and Facebook pages.
The custom pieces were my favorite. A guitarist could tell us which colors he wanted and I would find beads to match. Sometimes I used initials, skulls, specific color combinations, Rastafarian colors, or whatever else someone requested. Each piece became its own tiny design project.
One particular custom order also led to one of the strangest shopping trips Charlie and I have ever taken together.
One Friday after work, we needed specific bead colors for a sponsored guitarist, so we stopped at our local Michaels. The bead aisle was occupied by a group of four elderly people who didn't appear to be shopping for anything in particular, but somehow managed to block nearly everything we needed to see. After unsuccessfully trying to look around them for a while, we gave up and drove to Hobby Lobby.
We browsed a few other aisles before eventually making our way toward the beads.
The same four people were there.
This time, they began staring at us, whispering amongst themselves, and eventually praying loudly for the "demons" to go away. Apparently, they believed Charlie and I had followed them from Michaels and were stalking them.
We moved awkwardly into the neighboring bead aisle, where we soon heard them explaining the situation to a store employee. A moment later, the employee appeared in our aisle, clearly uncomfortable, and asked if everything was okay.
We explained that we were just trying to buy beads. Eventually, we left empty-handed and I ordered what I needed online.
Creative entrepreneurship takes you to some unexpected places.
When Handmade Becomes Hard to Sustain
We continued making Muffle Cuffs for several years, even after moving from Minnesota to Washington.
Over time, Charlie learned how to glue the faux fur onto the picture hangers while I concentrated on assembling the beaded chains, which helped divide the workload. Still, every piece required a surprising amount of labor.
If we didn't have hardware in the right color, we spray-painted it outside. When we needed black hardware, we sometimes used automotive touch-up paint. Gorilla Glue inevitably ended up on our fingers, fur scraps ended up everywhere, and every Muffle Cuff passed through our hands multiple times before it was finished.
They were tiny labors of love, but eventually the amount of work became difficult to justify for what we could realistically charge for them. We began wondering if there was a better way.
At one point, we found a factory and explained the product to them. CADs were created and we had a prototype made for mass production. Seeing our handmade idea translated into something that could potentially be manufactured at scale should have been exciting.
Instead, something was missing. The prototype technically resembled what we had created, but it didn't carry the personality of the handmade versions. The details that made each Muffle Cuff feel special were also the details that made them difficult to manufacture efficiently.
We knew it wasn't right.
Eventually, we stopped making them. By then, we had begun creating Berried Alive bandanas that could be wrapped around the headstock to achieve a similar muffling effect, and our attention was moving toward Berried Alive, jewelry, artwork, clothing, and the growing creative world we were building around those projects.
We weren't particularly sad to let Muffle Cuffs go. We had given the idea several years of our lives, learned from it, enjoyed it, and reached a point where it made sense to move forward.
What I couldn't see yet was how much of it we were taking with us.
The Skills That Outlive the Project
Muffle Cuffs never became the business Charlie and I devoted the rest of our lives to, but many of the things I learned while building it became part of how I work today.
Photoshop is the most obvious example. What began with Charlie showing me the handful of things he had learned from a designer at work became years of experimentation. I kept using Photoshop for my resin jewelry, then began learning more sophisticated editing techniques when we started producing photoshoots for Berried Alive's streetwear. I wanted the photographs themselves to become part of the artwork, so I took classes on Udemy, taught myself more advanced techniques, and eventually expanded into other Adobe programs.
Today, Illustrator is probably the program I rely on most heavily for design, but Photoshop is still open on my computer every single day.
The lessons went much further than software.
Muffle Cuffs taught us how to take a strange idea seriously enough to test it, how to make prototypes and accept that the first version would rarely be the final one, how to source materials from unexpected places, how to build a visual identity around a product, how to photograph and market what we made, how to reach out to people we admired and put our work into their hands, how to customize something for the person who would eventually use it, how to divide production between the two of us, and eventually, how to recognize when a handmade process was no longer sustainable.
I didn't know it at the time, but I was beginning to learn how products are developed.
There is a straight line between those fuzzy little guitar accessories spread across my craft table at our Minnesota apartment and the way I approach design today. The materials and scale have changed considerably, but the instinct is familiar. I still begin with an idea, experiment with how it might work in the physical world, make adjustments, study the details, solve problems, think about the person who will eventually use it, and keep refining until the object feels right.
Every Project Leaves Something Behind
I think there can be a tendency to measure a creative business by whether it lasted.
Looking back, I don't think longevity is the only measure of what a project gave us.
Muffle Cuffs existed for a chapter of our lives when Charlie and I were newly married, working ordinary jobs, making things at night in a tiny apartment, and slowly discovering how much we loved building creative projects together. We had very little idea where any of it would lead.
There was no House of Caswell yet. Berried Alive was still becoming what it would eventually become. I hadn't developed the design skills I use now, I hadn't built apparel collections, created repeating prints from my paintings, learned technical design and product development, or spent years figuring out how to translate ideas into physical objects.
We were simply curious enough to keep trying things.
One project taught us something that made the next project possible, and that project gave us skills we carried into the one after that. Sometimes the most valuable thing a creative idea leaves behind isn't the product itself. It is the new ability, new instinct, new relationship, or new way of seeing that becomes part of everything you make afterward.
Muffle Cuffs disappeared from our lives a long time ago. The things it taught me never did.
An Invitation
One of my favorite parts of looking back across my creative life is realizing how connected these seemingly separate chapters have become. A guitar accessory made from faux fur and picture hangers led me to Photoshop, Photoshop became part of my jewelry making, artwork, and Berried Alive designs, those projects taught me more about apparel, photography, branding, production, and storytelling, and all of those experiences eventually became part of the foundation I carried with me into House of Caswell.
At the time, none of it felt like preparation for something else. I was simply making whatever I felt compelled to make and learning whatever I needed to learn along the way.
If these stories resonate with you, I would love to invite you to join the Collector's List, where I share new Journal entries, behind-the-scenes artwork, creative process, collection updates, and the stories behind the projects that have shaped my work over the years. There are still so many chapters I want to revisit, from the strange little ideas Charlie and I built in our apartments to the artwork, music, clothing, and memories that continue finding their way into House of Caswell today.
I hope you'll follow along as I tell them.