Recently I’ve seen a few people asking for ‘memoirs’ of people who have been involved in fibres, built their lives around them, and lived for and around them.
Happens that I have one.
My store isn’t a nice agrarian life. I didn’t live on a farm, raise sheep, etc. Instead I chose weaving as a career, in an age where people didn’t actually do that. If they wanted a life in textiles, they became ‘textile engineers’, went to university, learning all about how to run 20th century equipment. Or they went into ‘textile design’ and learned how to make designs in cloth. Rarely did they actually learn how to weave, let alone hand weave their entire output.
I did.
Did I make a ‘living’? Sort of. I did make an ‘income’. And we did, in fact, live off the fruits of my loom for a number of years.
It also financed Magic in the Water, which was…interesting.
There was so much to learn that just the weaving, or just the designing, or just how to operate the equipment. It was all of it. I also had to learn how to run a business, budget and finance the operation, plan big projects and little ones, learn how to predict sales (almost impossible, really, but necessary – you have to have a plan), then create timelines that would get product on the shelves at the appropriate times.
Anyway, if you are interested in the journey, and the lessons learned along the way, it’s available on my ko-fi shop (link above).
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