What made you start writing a blog Emma?
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Well this year I'm taking part in Joanne Hawker's March Meet The Maker Instagram challenge over on my Instagram (it is one of my 19 things to do in 2019, which i will talk about more in a future blog post!)
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Day two's post prompt is 'how you started' which for me is quite a story! So I thought that I would share it with you on here. Now when I wrote this blog post I managed to write 3000 words over 5 pages on Microsoft Word, so i'm going to be nice and i will split my giant blog post into smaller separate blog posts for you so you don't get too bored of reading!
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Why did you start sewing?
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I started sewing because I didn't want to buy or wear anything from the high street and look like everyone else that I hung around with when I was younger, so I started making my own unique clothing! I like to be different.
When I was 16 I was desperate for a Saturday job. I wanted to earn my own money and have a bit more independence. Myself and my best friend used to spend hours flicking through the Yellow Pages, ringing every kind of business we could trying to find somewhere that would take us on. We had a lot of 'you just don't have enough experience' which was frustrating. (I mean how were we supposed to gain this experience without having a job!) Without any luck I then decided to take matters into my own hands.
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(That's me on the left, and my best friend in question, at 16 years old. Yes, we're dressed as farmers for our last day of school. We didn't want to turn up the same as anyone else.)
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My sister used to have lots of bead kits and craft kits for making various things. I started making little pieces of jewellery from the kits that she never used, so I began making those up in my spare time with the view to selling them. The only place I could think of to sell them at the time was on my Myspace page! This was quite a good outlet as I remember sending pieces to America & Australia, which is still exciting when it happens now, let alone 11 years ago!
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Here is an example of the type of jewellery i was making. I was an emo / scene kid at the time, making & selling emo / scene jewellery, to other emo / scene kids. I can't exactly explain what an emo / scene kid is now I've grown out of that phase, so i'll let google explain.
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When I get orders from exotic addresses, (and by exotic, I mean anywhere that isn't the UK!) I cheekily search on Google Maps Street View to see what the houses are like, you know, because not everyone around the world lives in a Victorian terrace house. (I certainly don't, but it was the best example I could think of!) Is that a little creepy or quite cool? But back to my Myspace days, as much as I enjoyed making jewellery out of Fimo clay and shrink plastic, I yearned for more. That's when I started branching out into clothing, as that has always been my passion!
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(One of my first ventures into fashion design, In the classic 'Myspace - i look better if you look at me sideways or upside down profile picture', just out of shot is the rather large camera i'm using to take the photo)
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Eager to see more embarrassing photos from my past and read about how i learnt to sew? - Stay tuned for my next blog post.
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If you can't wait that long, there are some more super embarrassing photos of my earliest creations over on my Instagram page!