We recently connected with Brianna Zielinski and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Brianna thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I grew up in a stitching family. Both my grandmothers sewed and my mom is a seamstress, so I knew my way around a needle and thread from a very young age. After learning how to sew by hand and also with a sewing machine as a child, I didn’t really use these skills much through my teen/young adult years. I went to college to be a math teacher and worked as a math interventionist until my second baby was born. In 2019, I decided to be a stay-at-home mom and needed something to do to keep me busy. Thanks to Pinterest, I had a ton of embroidery inspiration saved and wanted to try it out.

Like I said before, I wasn’t new to using a needle and thread and I also consider myself a great self-learner. I ordered some embroidery supplies in a big pack and despite them being subpar in quality, I stitched my first embroidery hoop with some old fabric and drew my design to follow with a regular pencil. All I needed to do was look up a couple of stitch tutorials on Youtube and I was off!

Once I had been embroidering for several months, my passion for teaching led to me create my own embroidery patterns for others to learn. I’ve been complimented time and time again by customers that my embroidery patterns are some of their favorites for how accessible and clearly written they are. I owe this all not only to my teaching background, but to my mom who has an education background herself and has taught many children (like me) to sew.

Obviously from a business side of things, having small children (now four kids ages 6 and under) and a small house (currently working on an addition) makes it hard to get things done in a timely manner and grow as I would have liked. Things like creating my own website and offering kits are on my list of goals but have taken the backburner for now. But I’m not upset, I love being able to be with my kids for these years!

Brianna, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I consider myself an embroidery and digital artist! Coming from a family of stitchers, my mom being a seamstress, I learned how to sew from a young age. I also always considered myself an artist as a child. I love drawing, painting, handlettering, etc. So those two worlds combined when I began doing embroidery in 2019. When I left my job as a math interventionist to be a stay-at-home mom, I started embroidery first as a hobby but then it snowballed into a career when I realized how much I loved it and knew I wanted to create embroidery patterns for others to learn as well!

I couldn’t keep my business to only embroidery because I just love to draw too much, so once I started designing digitally I started whipping up stickers as well. Now my shop offers embroidery patterns and hoops, stickers, magnets, and pins. I love to hand-letter, so a lot of my art includes my own handwriting, which I have to explain every time a customer asks what font I’m using.

In terms of what makes me unique as an embroidery artist and pattern writer, I know that my education background helps me be a better teacher to others and I always include probably more instructions than necessary to make every step crystal clear to the reader. I’ve also done a couple of stitch-a-longs where I provide video tutorials for stitching an entire hoop and that gets me even more into my “teacher mode”.

You can find me on Patreon as well, where I offer monthly embroidery patterns and stickers!

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

As an artist whose creative journey has definitely been influenced by family, and as a mom myself, I think seeing children and younger generations get into creating is the greatest reward. While I don’t make my embroidery patterns and videos geared at children, I love when someone messages me that they’ve introduced embroidery to their kids! My own kids love learning and experimenting with anything art related. The creative part of them getting to grow is so fun to see and when we get to do it together it’s even better.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I think the best thing others can do to support artists is to just let them create! In a world run by social media and algorithms, I think there’s entirely too much pressure on artists to become “performers”. These sites want reels and TikToks using trending sounds and dances and nonsense that seems to be the only way for your work to be seen not only by people who don’t know you but by the ones that already follow you. Trying to keep up with this pressure is causing burnout for a lot of artists who miss creating on their own schedule without having to photo or video along the way. Let’s let creatives create without the expectations and we’ll probably get better art out of it.

Contact Info:

• Website: bzcreationsshop.etsy.com
• Instagram: b.z.creations
• Facebook: BZ Creations
• Other: TikTok: @b.z.creations Patreon: patreon.com/bzcreations

Image Credits
Gideon Hunter