Hey y'all ! Here's a little bit about me...

 

Outside of work, I'm a Disney loving, DIY crafter, the wife to a superhero superfan, mother of one sassy little girl with another tiny human on they way, and I'm the creator of Project: Whimsical. It started as a way to justify my expensive obsession with vinyl, and eventually grew into something much more meaningful...

I started by creating personalization for just about anything I could stick vinyl on - custom car decals, clothes, bags, hats, cups, license plates, cellphones, make-up compacts... walls... When someone asks if I can vinyl something, I routinely answer with: "I'll try to stick vinyl to anything at least once, sometimes twice just to be sure!" And eventually it grew into friends, co-workers, and strangers requesting custom vinyl art. And somewhere in the midst of becoming just like every other crafter on Etsy, I created something with purpose.

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The Birth of the First Responder Autism Decal

One of my supervisors had a saying at work: "See a need, and fill it." By nature, I try to learn more about things that I feel uneducated about. Recently mental health has become a huge focus, which I am super thankful for. I realized that there was not a lot of education about Autism in law enforcement, but there seemed to be increasing reports of law enforcement interacting (sometimes badly) with people on the Autism Spectrum. And while I was educating myself on the diagnosis, an idea hit me. I had the perfect circumstances to create an easily identifiable but discreet sticker, to alert my fellow first responders that there could be a person with Autism in the vehicle. I know how we work, I know how we think, and I could spread the knowledge (therefore keeping it discreet) with my coworkers. And, without a tiny-print paragraph explaining Autism, I could take away the fear that must live in the back of some parent's mind, that it makes their child an easy target to a predator that is fully capable of reading that paragraph. To make this long story slightly shorter, I battled with the idea for a while, but I truly believe God fostered this idea, because I couldn't shake it no matter how hard I tried. So, I made it happen. I saw a need... And I've received almost nothing but positive feedback ever since. I've been asked to teach about Autism, and share the word about my decal. I've been sought out by other agencies, several from other states even! And all I ever wanted to do was to make the world a little bit better.  

 

So, here I am - between work, dinners, laundry, giggle fests and toddler mess, I design vinyl.

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- tif