A sharing of my little business and what we did during the pandemic time, especially the circuit breaker period when we stayed at home more. Just for for the sake of posterity, so I remember what it was like running a business in this climate.
The obvious change would be the cancellation of events… workshops and markets were postponed and pushed back to the never ending future. First a few months later and then later into next year…
You think we won’t be much affected by the situation after all we have been working from home all these while but with international borders tightening and airlines grounded, air-freight capacity became a trickle and uncertainties meant we had to stop overseas sales for a while. Tracking my packages already sent – panicking over how best to deal with it and celebrating every time tracking status changed, these were my pre-occupations for a while.
Then when we cut back on those sales to focus on domestic (thank goodness for local support!!), We started to run out of supplies (both for packing to mail and later supplies for creating our products itself) which became the next mental exercise. It stretched our creativity! With packaging, it made us think of how to reuse and make use of what we could gather. Boxes and cardboard gathered from our own household consumption became important to keep… Think pizza boxes/boxes for noodles for packages! And waxes paper to replace the bubblewraps I used to collect from the bookstore to reuse. I got good at folding them in a kind of origami so we used less tape. Also old envelopes to be reused for mailing a second time.
patchwork mini slings – one of a kind and using scraps to create
new bunny pins made from fabric off-cuts
With products, we started with more patchwork to use scraps which we already have. patchwork is slow, but meditative and best thing is we didn’t need to rely on new supplies which we didn’t have much access to now. I also found time to create more one of kind pieces as production slowed. It has been quite restful and custom orders could be picked up instead as I choose to slow down my rate of production to create more one-off pieces that usually took more time to conceptualise.
We also found more time for mending. Never something high on our to-do list suddenly it became something to keep our fingers busy with. A slow kind of way to work and extend the life of our favourite pieces we use daily. It started with my blanket then the projects grew bigger as we mended the sofa spread that had worn thin from being used to cover our couch.
mending favourite blankets to keep warm
the back of our big mending project: ikat sofa spread
Now that we are slowly opening up and workshops are restarting, I am planning for mending workshops. Such is a inspiration that came from unexpected circumstances. Good, bad, who knows!
first workshop after circuit breaker; smaller class size, safe distancing and masks wearing
ramblings. 