And together we are Jenn and Christie!

Our personal history would have to start out as a mere co-worker relationship. We quickly became friends and began sharing our passion for design and creativity. Though Christie comes from a graphic design background and Jenn comes from a photography background, both of our styles balance one another out & share similarities. We started thinking about how we could combine some of our talents & perhaps be a little lucrative in the process. We stumbled upon Etsy (yay!) and began selling our creations. Christie sells her cards and designs at christabelle81.etsy.com, while Jenn sells her photos at jenkra.etsy.com. Although we love (and I do mean love in almost an obsessive manner which most Etsian’s will understand) our new found creative community, we still had so many new ideas racing around our brains that we couldn’t get them all on paper fast enough. Thus “Our Detailed Simplicity” was born. It’s become a center for us to direct all our creative ideas & share them with others who share our common interests.

Whether it’s paper, fabric, paintings, illustrations, or photographs-we’re inspired by them all! We love incorporating our styles. Christie’s clean crisp design ideal combined with Jenn’s experimental technique philosophy fuses to create something brand new which inspires us to create all over again. We’re very excited to start posting new inspirations & start sharing different ideas with the blogging community.

Who is Christie?

Well, that's a good question. It could be answered by many people in many different ways, but thankfully I'll answer it personally.

I know I was coloring pictures, drawing with chalk on the driveway and making beautiful Mother's Day cards before this instance, but this is the first vivid memory I have where the creativity started to take shape. Walk with me. It was first grade, we were making calendars I believe and drawing pictures for each month. It was a summer month and I was drawing something outdoors. I had made a sun with my wonderful bright yellow crayon. Instead of making a circle, coloring it in and making some rays, I continued to make that sun as thick and full of yellow wax as I could. So round and round I went, until my teacher came and said, ok Christie I think you got the sun as bright as it can be. I still remember that moment to this day and to this day, would still get just as excited about a brand new box of crayons.

Just as I didn't stop making my sun as bright as it could be, I kept on through the years being creative and crafty. I had my years of being a tom-boy and thinking crafts were stupid, but in my girls group at church, everyone wanted me to do their craft b/c I did it so much better. I loved art class, the smell of the Mr. Sketch markers, cutting and pasting a collage of that years interests, entering my projects in the Fine Arts Festival. Then in high school I didn't get into art again until my junior year, where I fell in love with it all over again. Took all the classes I could and... enter the computer. We got our first computer in 1996 and from then on, I've been on it. I put art and computers together, doing graphic design in college and here I am.

I've found many new places for inspiration, on and off the computer. I'm trying to find a place for it in my busy life and love to put design into any area I can. I love being able to contribute to people's big days, like wedding invites and baby announcements, to enhance their small businesses with logo and website design and to fill my own home and others with the many ideas I have bursting out of my head (and my favorites list). I hope the drive of design continues as my family grows and becomes more busy, so this should be a place to find those little treasures we find or those places of inspiration. We (Jenn and I) hope you enjoy diving into our little design world!

-Christie

Favorite Blogs & Websites

Here's a list of all our favorite blogs & websites!!

Jenn's Personal Bio

The first time I remember being aware of photography was when I got a Fischer Price camera for my seventh birthday. It was a small bright blue plastic rectangle, with soft black plastic caps on each end (in case of an unfortunate meeting with the cement) and a bright yellow cord, just long enough to carry the camera neatly around my neck. The first image I ever made was through my neighbors’ living room screen. I was just tall enough to see my friends through the screen, and I yelled with excitement “Look at my new camera!!” I was so excited I couldn’t even wait for them to come outside. So they came to the window and I made my first image-the two neighbor girls, their upturned noses pressed against the screen, framed by the white peeling painted window frame. I haven’t stopped making images since.

Although I’ve been told I’m pretty good at “pure” photography, my passion has always been experimental in nature. As I grew to appreciate the rules of photography, I also grew to appreciate breaking them. I love breaking traditional techniques down, and seeing how far I can take any new technique I stumble upon. I’ve experimented with chemistry in the dark room, altered the surface of the photographic paper, mixed media’s, and manipulated my images through camera shake and long exposures, for as long as I can remember. So the majority of my photographic work reflects my experimental tendencies, but also strives to project a larger concept other than simple experimentation.