Hi! I’m Heather! I’m the lady behind everything Mumble Tease, my super small creative business focusing mainly on colourful and whimsical screen-printed apparel.

From drawing to screen-printing, mixing inks to applying to shows, loading up my van to traveling across Western Canada, photography to marketing, selling in person to mailing online orders, I truly do it all.

I started my official journey towards becoming a professional artist in 2008 when I graduated from the Alberta University of the Arts with a Bachelor of Design specializing in Illustration.

That degree gave me a good foundation in drawing and painting and design, but I didn’t learn to screen-print until after I had graduated, at a weekend Continuing Education course. We made our own screens and printed a couple of our own images, which would become the first two Mumble Tease designs. I had immediately fallen in love with the process of screen-printing on fabric. The rest of my journey into screen-printing has been self-taught.

Seventeen years have now passed since I took that screen-printing on fabric course. Since then, I’ve printed around ninety different t-shirt designs, with literally every shirt printed by my own two hands.

While I’ve improved my methods and equipment over the years, I still have fun printing everything myself, using cut stencils and water-based inks, in my home-based studio, using a selection of quality garments, all made in either Canada or the US and working towards using only sustainable fabrics such as organic cotton, bamboo and polyester made from recycled pop bottles.

I started out small, selling at local markets, then travelling farther afield, taking Mumble Tease to many different festivals and markets in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and the Northwest Territories.

Mumble Tease has been moving at a slower pace this past year or two as I embrace being the mother of a wonderful one-year old daughter and try to find a balance of being a mom and an artist that works for me. I’ve been traveling less, printing less, just doing less of everything Mumble Tease, but am still making it out to a handful of events a year and still producing new works.

I still love seeing my silly sketchbook doodles come to life when printed on fabric. I still love meeting and connecting with people at markets and festivals and seeing people’s reactions to my artwork and hearing why they connect with certain designs.

Most of all, I love being able to share my artwork and sense of humour with others in a functional and easily accessible way. I really feel like I’m brightening the world one silly shirt at a time.