Before I Press Publish

Written from the middle of the crossroads, a few days before this website goes live.

By the time you read this, I’ll have already done the thing I’m sitting here not sure I want to do. That’s the strange part. You’re arriving at a finished front door, and I’m standing on the other side of it in my pyjamas, holding a cup of coffee that’s gone cold, wondering what on earth I’ve just built.

So let me tell you where I actually am, before the polish sets in.

The ice cream container

This morning I woke up thinking about what I wanted to make today. Not what I should make. What I wanted to make. And up floated this lovely little idea: a fabric basket.

Nothing new. People have been making fabric baskets since fabric was invented. But I thought — what if I used an ice cream container inside it? Give it some structure, some backbone, so it doesn’t slump into a sad puddle the moment you put something in it. And then, ooh, what about a zipper? A lid, so the dust doesn’t get in. That’s actually useful. That’s the kind of thing I’d want in my own sewing room.

Lovely. Beautiful. Let’s go make it.

And then — and I want you to watch how fast this happens, because it took about eleven seconds —

I should write this down so I can show people how to do it.

I’ll need a video. Which means I’ll need to make it a few times to get the steps clean.

Do I digitize the quilting, or just use blocks? Well, if it’s just blocks then it isn’t really a product, is it? So I’d have to digitize. Original designs. Something that’s actually mine.

Right, fabric. Oh — not that one, the print’s too busy, the design will disappear into it. Not that one either, it won’t photograph well. But I love that fabric. I’ve been saving that fabric.

And there I sat. Coffee going cold. Basket unmade. Ice cream container still in the freezer with actual ice cream in it, which is honestly the only part of this story with a happy ending.

I hadn’t cut a single piece. I hadn’t threaded a machine. I had simply thought my way straight out of a perfectly good Saturday.

Eight years of this

Here’s the thing — I know this spiral intimately. I lived inside it for eight years.

Eight years of being a quilter and a blog and a social media channel and a tutorial maker and a personality and and and. Eight years of trying to be what everyone wanted, of watching what performed and quietly reshaping myself around it. Of choosing fabric because it photographs well rather than because it makes my heart do the thing. Of finishing a quilt and immediately thinking now how do I turn this into content.

And I lost so much in there. Not skill — I got better at the skill. I lost the reason. That thing where you walk past your sewing room and can’t help going in. That got very, very quiet.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t want to be the person who tells you teaching is bad. It isn’t. I like teaching. I’m good at it. I’m literally in a coaching role right now and I love it — I come out of those conversations lit up, not drained. So it isn’t teaching that hollowed me out.

It was teaching as obligation. Teaching as the tax I had to pay on every idea I had before I was allowed to enjoy it.

So why on God’s green earth would I be walking back into it?

The market question, which is really the worthiness question

And underneath all of that sits the quieter, meaner question: what could I possibly contribute?

There’s so much out there. Every pattern, every technique, every clever hack, all of it available, half of it free, most of it made by people with better lighting than me. Which makes “what can I add” sound like a reasonable business question when it’s actually just my old insecurity wearing a blazer.

Meanwhile there’s a Prostitcher sitting in my sewing room that cost real money, and every time I walk past it without using it I feel like I’ve stolen something. I should be using it. I should be developing a product. I should be building the thing while the website is fresh and there’s momentum.

Should, should, should.

And under all of it, the smallest and truest sentence I own:

I just want to quilt.

For someone else, for myself, doesn’t matter. That’s it. That’s the whole want. It’s not complicated and it’s not ambitious and it doesn’t scale, and I have been treating it like it’s a problem to be solved rather than the answer sitting right there in front of me.

I need that. Not as a business input — as a sanity input. That’s the balance that keeps me somewhere in the vicinity of sane. (Whether I’m currently closer to sane or to completely mental is up for debate, and I’m working on not caring about the verdict.)

Tula Pink and the trap of someone else’s map

So of course, paralysed, I did the healthiest possible thing and went to social media.

And there’s Tula Pink on the National Quilt Museum channel, telling her story. And she’s magnificent — genuinely, no sourness in this at all. I watched the whole thing.

And somewhere in the middle of it, that little voice: well why can’t I do that?

Except — that’s not my journey. That’s hers. She walked her road and it made her into her. Copying the shape of someone else’s calling has never once produced a calling.

And here’s where I have to be honest about the thing I’ve been circling this whole post.

God has been very clear with me. Not loud. Not a burning bush, not GO NOW AND DO THIS. He dropped this corporate job in my lap — this coaching work I love, with these people I get to actually help — and the sense I had was simply: Go. Do good. Be who I made you to be. That’s my assignment. That’s where the contribution goes.

And He’s been so patient about it. So gentle. No thunder, no ultimatum, just this steady quiet nudging over months, letting me get there in my own time, never once shaming me for taking the scenic route.

So what the hell am I doing?

I’ve got a clear assignment I love, and a craft I love, and I’m standing here trying to force the craft to justify itself in the language of the assignment. Trying to make quilting pay for its place in my life. As if the joy of it weren’t already the point. As if God gave me a thing that makes me feel alive and I responded by asking it for a business plan.

I don’t think that’s what any of this is for.

So here’s where I actually am

The website is launching. That much is happening. I’ve built it and I’m not un-building it.

What I don’t know is what fills it. Whether it becomes another content machine that slowly eats me, or whether it stays what it started as — a place where a woman who loves fabric puts down what she made and why, and if that’s useful to you, wonderful, and if it’s just nice to look at, also wonderful.

I don’t have this figured out. I’m launching a website from the middle of not knowing, which is either very brave or very silly, and possibly both.

But I’d rather start here honestly than start with a tidy origin story I don’t believe.

So let me ask you, because I suspect I’m not the only one:

Have you ever loved something and then monetised the love right out of it? Did you get it back — and how? Is there a way to teach and share that doesn’t slowly turn you into a brand? And when you sit down to make something now, whose voice is in your head telling you what it should become?

Tell me. I’d really like to know. I’ll be in the sewing room.

Probably staring at an ice cream container.