Hey everyone! I just wanted to check in and send my love to you all.

Here in the UK we are about to go into week 6 of lockdown and I know there are a lot of people at home right now feeling worried and anxious about their jobs, businesses and livelihoods. Also boredom is most probably creeping in for a lot of people.

So, I thought I would reach out to you all and share my story, in the hope it may calm or hopefully inspire you to try something new in this time we have.

8 years ago I was working for an events company. I liked it but I wouldn’t say that I LOVED it. Then one day the company closed down and I lost my job.

Now at this point in my life, I was nearly 30 years old, and I had realised that I had two options:

I could go and get another job in the same industry

OR

I could just stop for a while, take time out and spend some time thinking about what I actually wanted to do with my life.

When working in the events industry, I was always struggling with what to wear. I didn't want what everyone else was wearing on the high street as I wanted to be different but I couldn't afford £2000-£3000 designer labels. So I just thought to myself...it can’t be that hard to make a dress! Now I didn’t tell anyone about my crazy idea at the time, as I had absolutely no experience or education in designing and I actually couldn’t even draw!

I worked out I had enough savings to keep me going for about 4 months, so I decided to give it a go as I would only regret it if I didn’t at least try.

So that afternoon, I went to Argos and bought a sewing machine. When I got home I had no idea how to even thread a sewing machine, so I started watching YouTube videos so that I could learn.

From this point, I spent the next 2 months sat in my bedroom with the sewing machine on my left and my laptop on my right watching YouTube, learning all the different stitch types and how to put a garment together.

I decided not to tell anyone what I was doing or what my ideas were as I was worried that they would laugh or tell me that I couldn’t do it.

I could see in my head what I wanted the dress to look like, but when I tried to draw it, it never looked the same. So my only option was to teach myself how to create the dresses I envisioned.

During this learning period in my bedroom I had found a pop-up shop where you could hire a rail for a month.  I needed 20 dresses to fill the rail so over the next month I set myself the target to create these 20 bespoke dresses in time for the pop-up.

Now I will be honest with you, I only managed to create 18 dresses in time and what's worse is none of them had a zip (as I had not mastered zips yet!) BUT within a couple of weeks I had sold all of the dresses and I had already started creating more designs.