I don’t tell my story enough
Life of a bookbinder
September went by in a flash and already the weather has changed, the light is shorter and we find ourselves heading into Autumn, slowing down. How are you doing?
Today I watched a webinar by Bossbabe, from Newcastle - my adopted home town so already I felt, connected to her. There’s a hundred marketers out there and I really do enjoy this part of the job, but oh man can it be a slog right?
The free webinar was a great way to rethink my business and my offer and who I’m serving with my bookbinding tutorial business. So I’m spending time thinking about that and the one thing I realised was this:
I don’t tell my story enough.
How can I say more about how I came into this creative world, when in truth. I just don’t enjoy showing up on stories and reels every day. Who else feels this?
Ultimately I want to grow my business so that I can afford the holiday, the house and the experiences I want for myself and my daughter. I want to take her to South Korea to see her heritage so much.
How can I show up more and let people into my creative world? I love sharing my work and my tutorials and I know this is the step I need to take. So here we go. My plan is to create a free course and e-book in bookbinding where I share my story in a safe place. Fancy it? Tell me in the comments.
Okay first, Let me tell you about my month. Because it’s been wild and creative in all the best ways possible.
Jumping back into September (which I feel is really the new, new year) is hard after the summer. My daughter is 9. Isn’t it supposed to get easier when you’re older? I rang my friend (a curator of a gallery) for a chat and somehow that resulted in creating an exhibition from scratch and installing it within 2 weeks. IN THE SUMMER HOLIDAYS!!!
Why did I say yes?
Well I did say yes and here it is:
North of the River, East of the Moon New Exhibition 🎉🎉🎉
A new installation celebrates the timeless allure of the moon and sea, drawing inspiration from Korean and British folklore. This exhibition, coinciding with Korea’s Chuseok festival, explores the moon’s role in navigation, harvest cycles, and cultural rituals spanning centuries in both Eastern and Western traditions.
The exhibition was installed at Tynemouth Station Bridge. Created with 20 metres of paper half of which, was folded by hand. Huge thank you to Dawn Felicia Knox and Mina Ahmed for their help with this.
It’s been a good few years since I created an exhibition of this scale so I was thrilled to be able to do it.
My work on the moon came from an exhibition I had earlier in the year with The Late Shows and perhaps it was a response to a toxic old boyfriend who once said, he thought the moon made me crazy. Luckily he’s not around anymore and instead I have marvellous, wild, dreamy moon sculptures. Never forget those people who try to bring you down.
This month I also launched a new kit for my Chinese Thread Book Kit. Isn’t this paper so dreamy?
This project is my best selling tutorial I’ve ever made. Everyone loves it so much. I kind of feel sorry for the other books. I mean, you can’t beat origami though can you? It was the third course I ever filmed and I feel like I’ve learned so much since then, but sometimes the first thing you do is better than the last thing you did.
I think as a business and after delivering over 50 courses, you have to listen to your customer and the best way to listen to them is to see what they’re buying and let that inform the next thing.
This book comes from China and was made by women using mulberry paper and would hold sewing items. I have a lot of textile artists and crafters in my membership and as sewing is my favourite thing to do ever, this makes it really easy to come up with projects for them. So this month, spurred on by my need to make a hand quilt, I decided to create a needle book tutorial. Here it is:
I used an old book cover and created felt pages. Then I sewed round the pages with a buttonhole stitch and bound them into the book using a long stitch binding. I also made a template and stitched a cloud onto the cover. The full tutorial includes a PDF of the template I used to sew the cloud.
It’s included in my membership. If you subscribe to Paid it includes a mini make every month. View all the tutorials it includes here.
Lastly, following my Moon exhibition I was able to deliver some workshops from one of my online tutorials: Phases of the Moon Book in person and it was delightful to see the results. Take a look below and here’s the link to the online workshop if you want to try it out.
Wow what a bumper month! I also got a new carpet, fell on an off cut and sprained my knee and was on crutches for a week. But I’m much better now. Kinda proud I achieved all of this despite an injury. Go me!
How’s your month been?
Wow, this is just amazing, your work is magnificent! I will definitely pop in to your lovely shop when I’m staying with my family not too far from Hexham.