A Love Letter

how did I get here?

Do you ever find yourself in a loop?

You’re doing the same things again and again and the outcome is the same. The feelings are the same, and… you’ve started again, back in the loop. How did I get here? How do I keep doing this? How do I stop doing this? Why do I keep doing this?

Still in the loop.

I think it’s a very human thing to find yourself in these loops. These burrowed out spots of dis ease that don’t feel great, but have come to feel normal. There are even moments of triumph. Planned victories. You know there will be a sprinkle of joy somewhere in there, and so you stick out the loop. It’s what you know. It’s what you do. To so many, “you’re living the dream”. But at some point you say, does it have to be like this? Is this the way this really is? Is this the only way for this to be? Do I get to get off this thing?

If you are part of, likely any industry, it’s easy to get caught in the tide. Or establish these cyclical habits to accommodate seasons and trade shows and shipping deadlines, etc. Not quite the master of your destiny. Beholden to much; rewarded for little. Tiny pats on the head for keeping up.

I’d like to point out that these were my unhealthy habits compounded by the nature of an industry.

Having 2 weeks before something gets released to sew 4 samples, get them quilted. Being so invested so controlling that I, alone, would not sleep, make them all, get on a plane fly to some location quilt them myself, or have them quilted. Literally sewing myself into a dress as I boarded the plane. Which plane? To where? No one knows. Binding always binding. Never machine binding, because I didn’t like the way it looked. Always illusions. Illusions of success. Illusions of time. Illusions of any sort of sensibility.

There’s a fortune telling birthday book that Chronicle Books put out years and years ago, and on my birthday it says: you are idealistic and impractical…

The weight and the truth of that birthday fortune reverberates through me nearly every day of my life 😂.

Was any of it necessary? Maybe a mouse’s portion. The tiniest bit. Would people have helped me? Absolutely. Did I ask for help? Very seldom.

I burnt out. I could never really support what I was doing with marketing, patterns, or quilt alongs or anything like that because I was exhausted. So I was always falling short. Nothing was quite what it could have been. It was the loop. I’d design a new collection, the last one would arrive minutes before it was due and the race would start to get it in front of people. Somewhere the timeline got clipped. Everything got faster. Fabric stayed on shelves for a shorter time. I was making less money for more work. I was traveling nonstop.

It could not have been more unhealthy. I could not have been more unhealthy. But also, how would it have been different. Where were the guides? How would I have known or done it different? I started before I’d even graduated college. And what do college students do? I was never not working. Always forgoing sleep to get more done. Bad school habits became bad career habits. Bad personal habits, and so on.

I did this for years. For 10+ years. If I’m being really honest I burnt out about 4 years after I started, and I stayed in the loop for an additional 6 years because it’s what I knew, and how do you stop the thing especially when your income is tied up in it.

Then I met someone, Ben, and we got married, and I fell out of the loop. Poof! The thing I’d tried to stop doing for years sort of disassembled itself. Everything stopped. I stopped traveling. I stopped designing. I stopped making things. I stopped. Like Alice floating down the tunnel. I was lost. Death of a Salesgirl. Lizzy Loman. I’ll add, it’s probably not a great way to start a marriage, you know, with a full existential meltdown.

I fell into the darkest depression of my life. I’ve always had depressive tendencies, but this was a new level. I didn’t even send out wedding thank you’s. That still haunts me. I wasn’t ungrateful. I was just barely hanging on. The burnout was a full House on fire. I must have slept for a year.

It’s in times like these that you find out a lot about yourself. What you think of yourself. How you see yourself. I realized that if I wasn’t working to the point of ruin, in my own eyes, I was worthless. If I didn’t fill every second of the waking day with hard labor, I was letting myself (and everyone else) down.

Where did this come from? Deep buried energetic low self worth. A story retold over generations of women who were told and believed the same. The last 5+ years have been the actual hardest work of my life to undo this belief system. Life keeps throwing me these self esteem curve balls, and the more I learn and recognize, it’s as if the time stretches out before me and I can choose a different way to move forward. From this nonreactive elongated space.

Becoming

The greatest challenge and joy of my life has been becoming a mother. Still becoming. Always becoming. Magnolia is the light of my life. I didn’t realize it at the time when I was pregnant, and neither did my medical team, that I was very sick. Recently I was looking back at pictures from college and 10+ years ago, and I can actually see/feel how sick I was all that time ago. How disordered my eating was. Just harboring all of this for years and years. In a lot of ways, all of the years of running from everything nonstop had come home to roost. Every physical and mental vulnerability showed up at our door, all waiting their turn to be dealt with. And what was I doing? Working. Working essentially until the minute of my emergency induction.

What being a mother, what slowing down to be present with my wild little girl has done is put a mirror in front of me. Show me the BEAST (voice of Belle). Magnolia’s behavior is a really good barometer for my own. Am I present. Am I available. Am I listening. Am I caring for myself, because I then have a full cup to pour from. If I am, she’s good. She’s balanced. It’s such an incredible thing that one of the greatest gifts I can give her as a girl, a woman, and a human in this world is having a mother who loves herself. Teaching her to love herself. To make real boundaries. To hate no part. To learn from mistakes and instead of digging in and taking them on as identity, or running as fast and as far as you can, put them down and move along. Reassess. Love yourself through the failures. I get to show her the better way by living it.

Have I been excellent at this? No. I’m still becoming. Still getting out of those loops. But progressing. A perfect example of this was the little paper goods business that I started. I gained a lot of good from it, it got me creating again, and it also put me right back into that place of never not working. That industrial loop of seasons, and shipping deadlines. A perfect thing to hide behind and not really deal with why the same thing keeps happening. But! I was able to put the brakes on. Instead of digging in deeper, I was able to back away slowly. That’s something!

Let’s call it progress.

Designing Again.

I’d like to first say a few words about Andover Fabrics. I love them. I am so grateful to them. For so much. For seeing something big in such a young girl. For making the best cloth in the industry. For being so generous about so much. They are a family through and through, and I will always love them, and be grateful to them.

Designing fabric again wasn’t on my radar.

I’d consistently gotten emails weekly, sometimes daily over the years of people asking me to come back. Lots of instagram DMs. All telling my how great my new work would look on fabric.

Then in that weird week between Christmas and New Years of 2022, I was sitting at my desk, finalizing Valentines 2023, and I got this really clear impression: You should design fabric with Moda.

I hadn’t thought of Moda in years… I hadn’t considered designing fabric for years, and just as clear as day: You should design fabric with Moda.

Do you get these sorts of impressions? They sound like suggestions, but aren’t really? You talk back to it and say… but I…. don’t want to design fabric…. don’t have any close relationships with anyone at Moda…. don’t have ideas…. and the impression comes a little louder. A little more persistent. YOU SHOULD DESIGN FABRIC WITH MODA.

Ok…. a conversation wouldn’t hurt.

After the first of the year (2023), I reached out to a contact I thought might still be at the company. I’d always really liked her, and I was pretty sure she liked me… I just asked for a little direction about who to have a conversation with about their design process, and she kindly hooked me up with the head of the art department. Within days of sending the initial email, the art director and I were on the phone for over 3 hours talking about the industry, how things had changed, how they were the same. How groups were selling. How working with Moda looked like. I interviewed her while she interviewed me.

I realized in the conversation that if I were to start designing again, I’d be coming at this from a completely new place. Yes the tendency to overdo it, and take on too much lives deep within me, but I’d have the opportunity to turn a new leaf, and turn over a lot of what I had been shouldering to their processes and teams. I also realized there’s nothing I know better than this business. Which is easy to forget when you haven’t really talked shop like that in years.

By the end of the call we were in agreement that we’d give it a go. We wanted the same things.

The only reason why this can work now, why I’m able to take this on now is perspective. It really is everything. Besides my health, it’s the most valuable thing I possess.

When I started in this industry, I was so young! Just a girl. This was not a really collaborative process. Truth is, I was never a great collaborator… if you could imagine that…. Everything had to be just so. Everything was riding on every choice I made. I just don’t feel that way anymore. I’m exhausted even thinking about it. I’m a mom. When you get down to brass tacks, the only things that truly matters to me are the health and happiness of the people I love. AND, with the life I live now nothing gets done without massive amounts of collaboration.

Now she’s really growing.

Love Letter

The collection is simply put a love letter to three people.

First, my beloved Magnolia. The prints are all about her and things she loves. We’ll go into details of each print next week. I wanted her to always have something that I made just for her. Memories of her small and loved woven across time in a tangible thing spread out all over the world.

Second. My younger self. That girl trying so hard. Always believing in possibilities. Making good work. Putting herself out there. Trying to do it all. I think about her, and she needs love and direction. She needs a little perspective. She needs a nap. In my mind I reach back to her and tell her to not be so hard on herself. Spend more time in your garden little one.

Third. You. Thanks for holding on. Thank you for coming with me. Thank you for seeing me through my youth to adulthood. Thank you for loving me. I love you.

My hope with this collection is that you’ll love and use these prints. Whether they are a love letter to someone you love, or someone you once were, that they will anchor you to joy and the good things all around you.

If you read this far, I commend you.

This will be a weekly publication and I welcome you here!