It’s noon on Wednesday, and Cathy Zielske is live from St. Paul.

The 57-year-old YouTube personality is about to show people from Madrid to Massachusetts how to create a handmade card featuring a champagne flute, but first she has some housekeeping to address:

“Hey everyone, it’s Cathy Zielske, welcome back to my channel and my studio and welcome to my weekly livestream, ‘Cathy Makes a Card,’” she said. “We’re going to get into it today because I have some plans — and then I’ll tell you the story about losing my bra and why that’s a problem.”

(It was a problem, she told her followers later, because the Pioneer Press was coming to photograph her after the livestream.)

Zielske’s signature sense of humor, the way she is a content creator who keeps it real while showing you how to make something, is part of her appeal to the more than 77,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel — Youtube.com/@czdesign — who have helped her pivot in recent years from scrapbooking to cardmaking.

Just don’t expect her to send you a holiday card (more on that later).

A scrapbook star

Zielske, a graphic designer with a print background, initially found her path to crafty stardom after reading an article in the Pioneer Press.

It was 2001 when she saw our report about a (now defunct) scrapbook retailer, Archiver’s, opening a location in Roseville.

“I stopped by to look at their photo albums, as I’ve been a rabid amateur photographer since I was 15,” Zielske told the Pioneer Press in 2004.

She expected she’d ignore everything else.

“I had a preconceived idea of scrapbookers as ladies with stickers and decorative scissors,” she said.(Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

However, Zielske found that many of the modern scrapbooking supplies spoke to her preferences for a clean and simple aesthetic. She began creating pages about life with her husband, Dan, and their two kids.

When she submitted her work to “Simple Scrapbooks” — one of the biggest scrapbooking magazines in the world at the time — a staffer forwarded Zielske’s submission to Editor in Chief Stacy Julian with an urgent subject line: “Look at this now.”

“I had been saying that I was going to find the ‘Pottery Barn scrapbooker,’ and I audibly sighed when I saw her work. I thought, ‘Here she is,’” Julian recalled in 2004.

Thus began Zielske’s first pivot, which turned her into a global scrapbook personality whose specialty was “Crap-free scrapbooking.” She appeared at promotional events to engage with scrapbookers, wrote magazine columns, developed her own digital scrapbooking product line and offered up page design and other scrapbooking advice in books, including, “Clean And Simple Scrapbooking: Ideas for Design, Photography, Journaling & Typography” and “Clean & Simple 2: The Sequel” (both by CK Publishing).

At the height of this scrapbooking phase, she recalls walking into a national scrapbooking event in Minneapolis. Her son — 9 years old at the time — was with her. In this crafting world, he was recognized — Zielske’s readers had been watching him grow up via her scrapbook pages.

“Someone came up to him to ask for his autograph,” Zielske says. “He said, ‘Absolutely’ and signed their copy of my book. I thought, ‘That’s weird.’

“The thing is, I’ve always been humbled by it,” she says of the “celebrity” part of her gig. “I mean, it’s crafting — I’m not deciphering the atom. But I also appreciate that scrapbooking — and cardmaking — is a community. People seem to get really engaged.”

Pivoting

Trends wax and wane, of course, and that includes scrapbooking. After peaking in the mid 2000s, the Great Recession contributed to the decline of the craft: “Simple Scrapbooks” ceased publication in 2009, followed in 2013 by “Creating Keepsakes,” another big scrapbooking magazine. Archiver’s, the Minnesota-based retailer, hung on until 2014, when it filed for bankruptcy and closed its stores, followed by its online site in 2019. Creative Memories, another Minnesota-based company, also struggled with bankruptcies before relaunching its memory-preserving business in 2014.

Zielske’s industry contacts helped her survive — and grow — during this shakeup.

“Stacy Julian recruited me and others to teach online,” Zielske says. “It was great for me, to begin teaching content online, and it filled a gap in my income.”

Then, in 2015, she connected with Catherine Tachdjian, the CEO and president of “Scrapbook & Cards Today,” a Canada-based scrapbooking magazine.

“Her magazine is one of only a few still standing,” Zielske says, “and she was in need of a new art director.”

Tachdjian was a fan as well as a publisher.

“All the time I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m talking to Cathy Zielske,’” Tachdjian said. “I had admired her for so long.”

She not only talked to her, she hired her. While Zielske signed on immediately, she wouldn’t make her first card until 2017.

‘Holy craft!’

Although she was known as a scrapbooker, Zielske’s boss asked if she could make a couple of cards for a blog post in celebration of the magazine’s 11th anniversary.

Zielske gave it a try with the specialty card-making supplies the magazine sent her, including a die-cut machine.

“I had no idea what I was doing, but I made a couple cards for the blog post and thought, ‘This does seem kind of fun,’” Zielske says.

Or, as she proclaimed in the March 2017 blog post: “Holy craft!”

“I have found a creative groove for making simple cards that make me happy,” she wrote.

The timing was good: Some of her friends in the crafting world, including Jennifer McGuire, were making cards, too. And, as Zielske’s kids were now older, Zielske found herself at a crossroads both personally and professionally.

“I said, ‘I’m so tired of scrapbooking for magazines, can I please not scrapbook for the magazine?’” Zielske says.

Her boss agreed. Zielske would focus on art directing — and cardmaking. It was freeing, she said, to skip the storytelling that scrapbooking requires and instead focus on the art.

“I’ve never felt so crafty,” she says.

Cardmaking

Is cardmaking the new scrapbooking?

For some, it is.

This hobby involves buying products, organizing the products and creating with the products.

There are lots of companies making lots of products, with lots of crafty influencers like Zielske showing us how.

And, unlike scrapbooking, our photos — often trapped on our phones — aren’t even needed.

“The last few years have been hard,” Tachdjian says. “This is a way to connect with others — and it feeds our need to create.”

On Zielske’s YouTube channel, the creating comes with tutorials such as, “Let’s unbox the latest card kit from Simon Says Stamp and create FIVE cards!” and “Never have I ever … made a card that lights up!”

Zielske’s fan base includes her livestream moderators, who volunteer in their roles. Like Zielske, they crossed over from scrapbooking to cardmaking.

“I would spend my mornings watching her YouTube videos and then going into my craft space and try to recreate what I just watched,” Beth Goldstein wrote in an email. “Her videos were easy to follow and her instructions on point. The reason I kept going back to watch everything (I mean everything) she produced was for her humor.”

“I think we all look forward to Wednesday afternoons because we know we’ll learn something, have fun and see something beautiful come to life over the course of an hour while we hang out with friends,” said moderator Emma Eaton by email.

‘Cathy Makes a Card’

It was during the pandemic that scrapbookers and cardmakers began to gather virtually more often instead of traveling across town or across the country for conventions, scrapbooking or card-making parties and classes. Now, it’s become an established habit to get together online, such as watching Zielske make a card over the lunch hour on Wednesdays.

Earlier this month, as Zielske prepared to create holiday gift tags on Dec. 6, hundreds of her subscribers checked in via the live chat and illustrated how global her reach is:

“Hi from UK, I made it.”

“Aloha from Arizona. Love you Cathy!”

“Good evening from Norway, where the snow is falling down.”

“Hello from Ireland.”

With the help of her moderators, Zielske answered some of the real-time questions and comments as she also discussed the products and supplies she was using and walked people through the crafting steps.

Her fans showed their support.

“Glad you mentioned that purchases made through your links below benefit you (‘that’s how we make our money’),” one commenter wrote. “I did not previously know that. Mention each time — because we surely would! xox”

While Zielske earns enough money as a content creator to pay the bills, her YouTube era has required some changes to her longstanding work-from-home setup.

Recently, in honor of reaching 75,000 subscribers on her channel, she compiled a bloopers reel to highlight the challenges of running a business from the dining room table.

From competing with the sound of the kitchen coffee grinder to asking family members to mute the commercials on the television, Zielske said it illustrated why she recently moved her creative space upstairs.

“I realized I needed a dedicated space to work,” she says.

She’s got one now: After going to IKEA (and doing other shopping and reworking), she turned her small office into a home studio with lighting, sound muffling, storage and organization systems — and even a mini-split ductless air conditioner that is her favorite element.

After her livestream on Wednesday, she headed downstairs to say hello to her “grandcat” — she was caring for the cat while their daughter was out of town — and thought about getting the Shepherd’s pie she made earlier heated up for dinner for when her husband, a teacher, and her son, a student, got home.

One thing that’s not on her list? Holiday cards.

“I actually don’t send many cards,” she says.

(She’s like the shoemaker who goes barefoot.)

“And my deepest shame, one that I’ll only admit to you and to the readers of the Pioneer Press, is that even though I work in cardmaking, I haven’t sent a Christmas card since before the pandemic,” Zielske says. “And I’m OK with that.”

It’s just another pivot.

“I have noticed over the years that pivoting is something she is extremely good at,” her husband, Dan, said in an email. “In that sense, she’s maybe the David Bowie of the crafting world.”