I took the Christmas holidays off to rest, spend time with the children, and think about what had gone well and what could possibly have gone better, and where I wanted to go in 2013. I thoroughly enjoyed the process which mainly seemed to involve a lot of days in PJs and lots of knitting. Honestly that really helped my thinking and certainly my resting!
Work has been progressively getting busier and busier these last 6 months which meant I have had to start prioritizing a lot more. Also the nature of the work has changed a lot. Whereas last year I still spent a lot of time making things and selling them at craft fairs, now the focus has shifted to teaching and repairing/ servicing sewing machines. I still get a decent amount of orders for my quilts but I have stopped making new stock for fairs and have stopped stocking in small shops as I seemed to spend more time doing admin and shipping items than I wanted to. And at the end of the day I love teaching and also love getting peoples' machines back on their feet so it was only right to concentrate on that.
The press seems to have discovered me a little which is sweet. My vintage machines were featured in Homes and Antiques in January, they did a sweet feature on collecting vintage machines and the machines went on a day out to have their pictures taken. Look at them shine!
This month I am featured in Sewing World magazine which is out right now. I had not read it before but obviously had to go out and buy it, so I rushed to my local Hobbycraft (how fab to have one near now!) and there I was... I was so impressed I showed some random guy in the shop! He seemed suitably impressed too... Now I am writing a little feature for them which should be in the June issue.
Now to get featured in Molie Makes... new year's resolution for 2013 me thinks!
The classes I teach are all going well, I am learning heaps myself, about teaching and also about sewing (it just never stops!). Lately I have been learning about dog coats, fitting a tight brassiere top, how some people are just way better than I am at free motion embroidery (Helen I am talking about you), rectifying fitting issues and have discovered thermal curtain lining (where have you been all my life?).
I have also decided to work a bit less in the evenings and have started (or re-started) some knitting projects. I am doing a cool Craftsy class on knitting a top-down Icelandic jumper, which is now almost done(see pictures above of the yoke) and I have frogged and re-started my Paperdolls jumper again. It now has nothing to do with paper dolls anymore and after finding a cool stripey bit of knitting I had done years ago )below left) I am finishing this jumper in a funky stripey yoke (bottom right). I think third time lucky and this one is staying!
Happy new year guys!
