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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