Revolution resolutions

As an endless list maker,mainly on my hand,I of course embrace the opportunity to make one for my New Years resolutions,using multi coloured Sharpies,obvs and with a liberal sprinkling of stars.

I kept 2016's list up on the pin board all year and aside from "being more sociable" I nailed it pretty well,down to the exact truck and the comfiest sofa- which is ,thinking about it,probably why failing on the being more sociable was a bust.


To be honest, although my actual nights out can be counted quickly,I don't feel like it was a bad thing.Being on my own means time to think & to create unhindered by responsibility and with starting my own business,those things have been integral to working out what the hell I'm doing.

There are the old chestnuts on every NY list - regular exercise and a healthier diet- that fade in and out every as the year peaks & troughs,though this year I gave up meat & cows milk and try eat Turmeric everyday & I actually feel like it's sticking, so keeping it up is the goal for 2017.Proper exercise went way out after I broke my ribs,err last May, but I feel like I run up the stairs a 100 times a day so I'm not exactly slothful, still it wouldn't hurt to make it a bit more official.

The business is obviously high on the agenda for 2017, keeping it going and what the shape of that will be, it's all still a work in progress,but 8 official months later,today actually, I'm still trading,all be it if at a lull over next few weeks. Admin not my strong point, I feel I might need a (vintage) filing cabinet to help keep me organised, ahem...
Part of developing the business is learning new skills and making Art part of my daily life.Can you teach a techno retard new tricks? Watch this space...

After that the list gets a bit more serious...Save the Elephants, Tigers,Polar bears,The Arctic, rain forests,Wolves, the rights of indigenous people,Whales,Coral reefs,the Antarctic, Fresh water,Krill,Sharks ...did I say the Bees? Birds, Frogs,Glaciers,Madagascar,Borneo,Giant Pandas & Tortoises,Butterflies,Bears, Bats,Dolphins,Seals and Penguins,to name just a few creatures and places on the critically endangered list.

We've all heard that 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded in an increasing list of hottest years ever ( Insert joke about the British Summer here) but dig a little deeper and you'll find some very scary statistics about what is really happening to our environment that is kept out of the media for fear of mass panic. We have gone over the tipping point in terms of rising temperatures,sea level rises,pollution, fresh water shortage, food shortage and the planets wildlife are deep into the 6th mass extinction- in as little as 30 years, One fifth of the worlds creatures will cease to exist.
 Make no mistake,the world's future ain't looking too bright,so is there any point spending 2017 trying to save the planet or should all our resolutions be more along the lines of "Enjoy yourself it's later than you think?"https://youtu.be/hdqigZ50Zlc

To save my sanity I've had to reconcile my concerns to what I can actually do in my day to day life to feel like I'm at least trying to wrestle a life jacket on a sinking ocean liner.I've stopped eating meat, cut way down on dairy,am watching my consumption, recycling,mending & avoiding plastic and packaging where possible but Big society doesn't want me to do any of those things so it's an uphill battle.

Still it's one I will be dedicating 2017 to, in the vain hope that if enough people can be the change we wish and need to see in the world. Let revolution be your resolution.

And if it all goes belly up as the planet takes her revenge
 ( Watch out for that Italian Volcano) I bought myself a 2nd hand copy of Ray Mears Bushcraft skills for Christmas...





George Monbiot The climate crisis is already here

What if we just went Wild?

Ben Fogle seems an unlikely source of inspiration but having just wikipedia'd him I have to say he seems like a bit of a hero, supporting lots of charities and standing up for indigenous people.
 He has certainly triggered something major in my thinking with his series " New Lives in the Wild"  (Channel 5). I watched the last series in 2013 from my warm sofa with the glass of the TV safely protecting me as I marvelled at the dedication and resourcefulness of these brave but bonkers people but that was in a world pre Brexit,Trump, obvious climate change,before 'Before the Flood' and 'Hypernormalisation'.Now with all that's happening on the playing field, suddenly those people abandoning society seem like the sane ones.
When I was a angsty teenager, inspired by Henry Rollins, I wrote shouty poetry about being a lab rat trapped in a cage being experimented on and how I would spend my life gnawing at the cage to get out, then I got into debt at university and there I was slap bang in the middle of the cage,though I was too busy having fun to realise it. ( As an aside act of rebellion I still earn too little to pay my student loans.) 
 Bogged down by an overdraft and a ridiculous loan  and having worked in pubs since I was 16, I ended up in a career I never aimed at, as a restaurant (ironically still a word I can't spell) Manager and spent over 20 years serving food & drinks to large swathes of the population.
But everything happens for a reason right? I've watched people pretty closely over a whole generation but last Christmas eve (of all nights) after a long night of watching the worst of people (Wether you like it or not, very drunk people are hell to the sober) a customer was so rude to me I knew I'd finally seen enough.

It's taken me a while to recover & realise but thinking back to my early working days people were just, nicer, friendlier, generous and definitely had more manners, there's always some idiots by the numbers game, but the generation and the mood back then were an infinite improvement on the behaviour of customers of the last few years. People have got more and more pissed off and some of them are so unaware of it they act out like frustrated toddlers who can't express yet how they are feeling. The rest just get drunk.

Yesterday I cleaned out my daughters tiny bedroom and somehow filled copious boxes with stuff.I had a huge bag of rubbish let alone bags of discarded toys and clothes for the charity shop,it took me hours to sort it all out and all the time I was thinking how we're all conditioned to constantly buy more stuff when there is more than enough stuff  here all ready,perfectly good stuff , so why import more from China at great environmental cost? And how much stuff do we actually need? If you were forced to flee for your life,would you waste any time taking all that stuff? After yesterdays marathon I realised it would take days to pack what I own, when actually all you'd need to survive is warmth,food and water.

I won't get started on the commerciality of Christmas,again, but in my head when I see all those gift sets in the shops, I have this image of a giant pile of rubbish with a droopy christmas tree on top as Noddy Holder sings hollowly to the blackened sky. Bigger,better, faster, it's all distraction from the ugly truth that we are trapped in a financial and political system that pretends but does not serve the greater good,especially that most crucial of elements,the ecosystem we live in.

The facts are all out there if you look, our ecosystem, to which we are all connected,know it or not, is a delicate balance of many things and like a house of cards we're now just one degree celsius away from serious repercussions.Let's not forget that the UK was joined to the continent before a huge seismic shift in the atlantic resulted in a Tsunami & made us an island.It's predicted half the UK could disappear again as tides grow higher.

To get to my point, things is only gonna get uglier so perhaps now would be a good time to get gnawing on that cage. 

But could we, just go wild, I mean? For a start there are all sorts of tedious laws preventing you from leaving the system and just living on some wild land, right now you still need serious money and planning for that to happen.I feel increasingly frustrated by the housing system which puts us in tiny boxes which we pay through the nose for,or can't even get that far, in many peoples cases. Whose land is all of it if not ours?
Then there's the question of coping, I might like to imagine I'm Sarah Connors but my skills need work. I'm pretty sure I would kill someone if it mean't saving my loved ones, but would that be enough to survive in a post flooded world?

This last year working alone has made me pretty feral and I can't say I miss the Rat race.
I've never achieved more in my creative work or had better relationships, however it maybe a joyful thing to get off the treadmill,but in financial terms I am subjugated by poverty and my single parent status.

I think retreat is the best option, far away from "civilisation" and high up, away from the coast 'cos when the North pole melts there's gonna be a lot more water to contend with...
I can't help but wonder,however, if we started society again would we eventually make all the same mistakes again? I like to think future generations wouldn't be so stupid as to put faith in money and politics, the way things are going, they really are going to learn the hard way about greed and need so as not to repeat our mistakes.

So whose up for it ? Granted though Outer Mongolia is very cheap it's cold, so I'll keep watching Ben F for suggestions, if we all chipped in a bit I'm sure we could find somewhere in the world to go & have a go at living better, loving the land instead of abusing it, caring for animals instead of killing them and using our skills to survive,not our credit cards.

FYI though, I'll be banning Christmas as we know it.

In tune with the moon

We live in a culture where older women on TV are phased out,where we feel we have lie about our age,where childless women are lambasted, where periods & the menopause are still a misunderstood joke subject and we're the lucky ones...In many societies women still have no rights at all,although change is happening and we need to be part of that.

I was introduced to the teachings of a woman called Jewels Wingfield by a friend who went to one of her sessions at a festival earlier this year. Www.jewelswingfield.com

Even via a recap of her point of view, I knew instinctively that she was expounding a truth about female power that resonated strongly through me.Her belief,condensed, is that,"A circle of women may be the most powerful force known to humanity."

She teaches about how, before patriarchy, women used to live in large groups where the menstrual and lunar cycle was honoured and harnessed,giving us a power that men were so afraid of that they sought to disseminate it by breaking down groups of women and isolating them,making periods taboo and using organised religion and politics to stamp out our intrinsic connection with the earth and her cycles.

Over the last few months I have been using an app to track my menstrual cycle, there's lots to choose from but the one I use is called 'Hormone horoscope'. You plot your cycle and everyday it tells you where your hormones are at and how this might make you feel. As a single woman I've paid scant attention to my periods for ages,apart from joking about the onset on menopause with no real comprehension, but using this app has brought a whole level of awareness that feels completely empowering.

"By nature, women are lunar. It's no coincidence that the length of our menstrual cycles are synced up with the waxing and waning of the moon, occurring around every 28 days. If we are synced up with the moon's cycle, we will menstruate around the new moon and ovulate around the full moon."

http://www.drnorthrup.com/wisdom-of-menstrual-cycle/

Since being so aware of my periods,even for a month, I've felt this force unveiling itself.If we can harness our personal cycle,get in tune with it and tune it to the moon then we can utilise the feminine power that we've been disconnected with and put that power to good use.

"If we are going to see real development in the world then we must invest in women" Desmond Tutu.

It will take feminine consciousness (not necessarily female) to change the destruction of the planet for profit & stop environmental devastation.Male and female we need to recognise how we are all connected to the earth and her cycles.

An recent TV advert for some wild man type series got stuck in my head as the older guy that narrated it was talking about how the modern world is so square and yet nature is so round.Squares represent earthly grounding,organisation and efficiency where as circles are safe and comforting yet powerful in their ability to move freely...Sounds like male and female energy to me...Point being although I never saw the actual TV show it made me think about circles and cycles,the shape of the planet,the moon and wombs.

There is tons of interesting data on how women "sync up" in groups and will all start to menstruate at the same time. My best friend lives 200 miles away yet our periods are due at the same time,coincidence? 

Interestingly I can't find much research on what living in close proximity to a man does to our hormones but I'll bet my bottom dollar that we are suppressed by male hormones which is how patriarchy asserted itself,divide and conquer.

Living as a single parent it has always seemed simple to me that the government should be mooting schemes to house single mothers together in order to provide practical support for each other,it makes complete sense,that's how we used to raise our children, but it seems society is intent on keeping women solitary, chained as we were to our kitchen sinks in order to keep our power diminished.In the western world we are luckier than most women with our freedom but thick or thin the chains unite us all and we need to start swinging them (in a circle?) to break ourselves free.

We all know how important our female friends are to us and the energy a group of like minded women can raise and the time is now for us to utilise that power to make the changes the world so desperately needs.

I believe that if we all could listen to our cycles we would quietly invoke enough power to give Mother Earth the voice she desperately needs.We love our planet and as Mothers,Aunties,Grandmothers,Sisters & friends we want to pass a beautiful,safe world for our children.It's time we took back our power to create that world for them & for all living creatures.
Oh yeh and I know I keep banging on about it but watch 'Before the flood' it will push your "Do something' button.

Full moon tomorrow sisters.Get out there and soak up some moon beams and know that it is an essential key to how we reclaim our sacred femininity.

PS There is so much amazing information out there that will empower you.The app I'm using is http://hormonehoroscope.com but there are tons to choose from.

Other reading-

http://mytinysecrets.com/the-secret-power-of-your-period-revealed/
http://foreverconscious.com/the-feminine-moon-cycle
http://www.moonsong.com.au/the-spiritual-practice-of-menstruation/

Built to last

This week the business is six months old and I am now officially standing on my own two feet financially...gulp.This knowledge simultaneously sends me into a huge panic and makes me proud at how much I've achieved in those months.
Starting a business has been the steepest learning curve, much like having your first baby,you have to learn to adapt every day as your baby/business grows and takes on different needs,I've also had a lot of sleepless nights worrying about being the only bread winner.The nature of the business has shifted as I've learned what sells and where my passions lie.As it turns out I would really like to go back to university and study textile design but day dreams aside (Still not paid off my last student loans) I have bought myself a 2nd hand Mac and am on the long,very confusing road of teaching myself from tutorials, with the aim to eventually master surface pattern design and do something with my handwriting skills...

Dealing in vintage turned out to be a perilous path...At points I couldn't bring myself to go to a car boot sale ...I know...Purely because all the fun was being sucked out of looking for vintage when you're thinking about it's resale value all the time. My contract ends at the lovely Design@44 this weekend :( and I'm considering the next best move. I have really enjoyed having a retail space that I can make look pretty but although I sold a fair few bits and pieces it wasn't enough to make profit.No discredit to the shop,vintage is a niche market and it's finding the right retail outlet. Bunting Workshop and I are doing a stall at the Derby Christmas night market on the 17th of November so come along and say hello.

One thing that I have discovered in my vintage dealings is how much better made things were back in the day.I can almost date things now by the materials and workmanship involved in the item and you can clearly see that as soon as China got involved, how products quickly became mass produced using cheap materials with minimal workmanship and craft. 

I bought some vintage Christmas decorations at the weekend...which I may have mentioned once or twice...There were decorations in the box going back to the 1950s ...beautiful glass hand painted fairy lights and a Christmas fairy with jointed arms and original mercury glass baubles that were all testament to when things were made to last,when we treasured our belongings because we didn't have the mindset of new new new every year.

I raged a while ago about Ikea ...Deemed revolutionary in its day admittedly, now it just fuels the throw away culture we seem to have adopted.If I go to the Tip I want to climb in the bins after things I can see that could be reused and upcycled and it saddens me that we are filling the earth full of waste when it's so unnecessary.

Why have we let new become better when clearly things were made so much better in the last century? The tiny detail in some of those Christmas decorations speak of pride in the job and care in the design and that attitude is my inspiration for moving forward with the business.

Good things take time to create and when I'm panicky about my income, I will remember that at six months old babies can't even walk...

There's no place like home...

Working with the great British public presents it's unique challenges and believe me,after 20 years of customer service, I've pretty much dealt with them all from being groped while carrying a full tray of glasses, being spat at after refusing to serve a drunk customer, being stuck with a £60 bill after my table legged it without paying and cleaning up more alcohol laden puke than I care to think about... so it is with great joy that travelling to work these days only involves going down the stairs and turning right out of the kitchen to spend the day with myself.

My studio AKA the dining room is tucked away at the back of the house with no distractions...or so I thought smugly as I hung up my serving cloth for the last time and embarked on starting my own business,working from home. I'm now 5 months into this crazy venture and every day is a huge learning curve and hanging out in the dining room now has a very different purpose.

I'm not complaining,I was so ready for a new challenge. Quite frankly it's a miracle I hadn't all ready spontaneously combusted whilst polishing my millionth piece of cutlery. In retrospect throwing myself in at the deep end of being my own boss was possibly the act of a desperate woman but,like motherhood,it's probably not something you'd actually do if you only looked at it in black and white, which goes to prove this Cheryl Strayed quote correct.Those shitty waitressing jobs did add up to something, they gave me the drive to go out and work doing something that I actually love and that fit's in with the ever increasing demands of my life.

So I get to my desk/dining room table by 9am,5 days a week then all hours of the weekend too .I'm ever increasingly surrounded by piles of bright fabric, all begging me to make something, and random vintage items that I really want to keep but have to sell.
 It's a weird midcentury cornucopia of work & love,I couldn't ask for more inspirational eye candy, although I fear the imminent toppling of my vintage suitcase tower...up to 8 this week,its like a game of retro Jenga when I want to find something in the bottom one.

  

This week however things have been quiet and  I've been going a bit stir crazy stuck in the studioslashdiningroom and have been wandering away from my desk a fair bit. If I make it out of the kitchen I don't seem to find my way back.The hall needs hoovering, there's a pile of washing,grass needs cutting & when is the last time I changed the beds? Housework jumps out at you with every diversion from your desk and it's easy to get distracted.

 After wasting away a good hour touching up the chipped paint on the stairs...with Hammerite    ( It's not even like there was a tin of gloss beseeching me from the shed)  I have realised that getting the motivation is one thing,keeping it is another,especially when sales are sluggish and Ebay send you a whopping bill for all your hard work...

Staying inspired when the chips are down is to be another challenge on this learning curve so I've had a word with myself and spent the day away from the sewing machine.I finally used the accounting software I'd enthusiastically signed up for, then studiously ignored, watched some how to succeed on Ebay videos on You Tube then decided I'd write this blog about procrastination whilst blatantly procrastinating...My multi tasking is getting awesome ;)

And as an ironic joyful consequence I've sold two things while I've been blethering onto you so maybe a little break from bossing myself around is no bad thing...

Follow me on Instagram #wildsandfree for all my latest makes and finds.
Shop for quirky vintage @
http://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/wildsandfree

#girlboss

So here we are,officially in business...I have a letter from the Tax office with my company name on it & everything...The fact that I can't actually log in to my account because I've lost my reference number, I am blaming on the Admin assistant/ Marketing manager/ Senior Seamstress/Sales Rep/Head buyer and Tea girl,errr, Me.It's no wonder I couldn't see where I'd put it from under all those hats...

Thank God then (and my sister who bought it for me) for #Girlboss by NastyGal founder Sophia Amoruso (http://www.nastygal.com/) which is kicking my ass through the first few weeks of being the boss of me. I won't spoil her story too much with details but from one girl going out on an Ebay wing and a prayer, to another, she is inspiring me at every page turn.

I'm a single parent, which is a confusing curse and blessing. If I don't make any money I can't rely on another income to pay the bills, which in turn gets me out of bed at 4am to get stuff done and fuels my determination to make my business succeed. One of the many reasons I want to be own #girlboss is so that I can work flexibly to be there for my kids.Another is to stand by the life lessons I am trying to teach them,that you can do anything you want, if you work hard at it.

Three weeks into selling and I've had one good sales week and two of the 'Beans for tea' kind but thanks to Sophia I refuse to be phased. I knew from the start that this was going to be the steepest learning curve since realising babies don't come with a guidebook...and I need to heed her sage wisdom that, " When your goal is to gain experience,perspective and knowledge, failure is no longer a possibility."

She advises that when an item doesn't sell, it's not because of the item ( My mantra is if you don't love it, don't sell it in the first place) but how you've gone about marketing it and I know that that's the hat I'm least comfortable in (though clearly the admin hat needs a jauntier angle too.)
Sewing machine wins over self promotion every time but I 'm going to have to put my fabric away and get busy with my sales pitch. Suggestions welcome.

There are moments of doubt,I'm only human and a stupidly sensitive one at that but I'm learning  to tell those niggles to shut the hell up. I've never done most of those jobs before,it would be arrogant to assume I can nail all of them from the off.

I took a rare day off this week to have a huge sort out (before I lost one the children in the piles of stock) & to actually get out the house. Something about driving always lends my brain to serious thought,the kids joke about the conversations we end up having, I find it's a perfect time to enlighten them, as they can't walk away from me...

So I'm musing on how to move forward with the business and trying to silence those asforementioned doubts when I had a problem with my truck and I pulled into Kwikfit in Heanor and the mechanic was a girl. I've been driving 20 years and trust me, I've frequented a lot of garages, but I have never met a female mechanic before, I'm sure she's not the only one but it didn't stop me gushing over her like she was the second coming. Afterwards I wondered if it was conversely sexist to comment on the fact, after all why shouldn't a woman be a mechanic? but whatever the politically correct reaction would have been, I knew she was a sign to ignore the odds and as Sophia puts it ,"Difficult doesn't mean impossible and out of the bajillion things in this universe that you can't control,what you can is how hard you try."

I best crack on then...

http://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/wildsandfree


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Work is love made visible...

Work is love made visible...
I've got this poster over my fireplace. When I was writing scripts I mostly got what he meant but as mainly my thousands of words remained unseen, I was having trouble with the 'visible' part...
When I put down my pen and went back to bar work there was,sorry to say, very little love for the work I was doing, save for the people I was doing it with and a handful of lovely customers.

My love affair with vintage fabric began with lusting at pictures of the beautiful patterns and colours on Ebay & Pinterest, occasionally splashing out on a must own piece and picking up random bits at car boot sales.
It turned into a full blown torrid affair when I bought the campervan last spring and decided I would do all the re upholstery myself.The process of making soft furnishings and collecting beautiful bits to use whilst camping set off an unexpected bonfire in my heart. I didn't have a clue back then that, a year later, I would have bought myself a sewing machine and hung up my bar towel for good (please) and decided to make good on Kahlil's wise words.

Being a single parent is a tough call but occasionally I get to reap the benefit,literally in this case, as the government are running a scheme for people on low incomes to start their own business-  https://www.gov.uk/new-enterprise-allowance- so for the last six weeks I have been working with the team at Erewash partnership to put together an application for the NEA scheme which offers funding and support for the first six months of your business start up.
The funding is by no means a given and in my case, as the business is only part time initially,there is some doubt as to whether I will actually qualify financially, but the funding aside, I have been working with a brilliant mentor to produce a business and financial plan for the year ahead.

 All I had, as I went into the very first meeting, was a vague idea that I wanted to refashion vintage and salvaged fabric into other items, mostly camper van related;storage holders,cushions,curtains and such like.Thanks to the requirements of the scheme I have battled,refined and honed my hazy ideas by doing tons of research for my business plan and have watched my little acorn start to put down roots. Today I'm upcycling fabric finds to sell on Ebay, next year I'm aiming for an online one stop festival shop using re and up cycled materials and selling other ethically sourced goods, the year after that I'm taking on the world...

I'll admit that the financial spreadsheet was a nail biting test of my pathetic maths skills. (Thank you Andrea Thomas, my unofficial accountant.) Nothing is more terrifying than looking at all your in and outgoings in black and white and realising that you've got some serious sewing ahead of you if you're going to keep your children in shoes...

"This aint gonna be easy...You gotta put it in..."  Kelly Rowland wisely sung in the aptly titled  "Work" and how right she was.Since I decided that I was setting up my own business I've been a full blown recluse. (Apologies to all my long lost friends that I've ghosted since Christmas.) I'm only three months in and I've all ready realised that being the boss is a 24-7 job, I even dream about things I could be making. Any time spent away from my laptop and sewing machine is always tinged with niggling guilt. I worked Saturday nights at the pub for three years,now my new found weekend freedom entails sitting at my desk doing embroidery....and yet somehow,despite the lack of social life,the 3am panic attacks about gas bills and the crippling doubt that no one else likes my style, I am happy,happier in fact than I've been in years,I bounce out of bed, work my ass off then I fall into an exhausted sleep and do it happily again and again because each time I reach into my sewing box with an idea, pull out a beautiful bit of fabric and turn it into something tangible I finally get what Kahlil Gibran means. 


 Wilds and Free

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