Yay! My second blog post! This is a little lengthy, so grab your coffee and get comfy.
A question I get asked sometimes is how I got started. Although sometimes I feel like I need to tell people my story like when I introduce myself when doing events/vendor shows/classes or being featured in the news. So, might as well put it on here too :) I will warn you that my stories are never short. I can make a short story incredibly long. I am also kind of blunt and say things how they are, which surprises people, but I really don't know how to be fake or beat around the bush. I'm working on doing it with more grace though haha
I wish I had a cutesy story that like my mom or grandmas taught me when I was young, but truth be told, they had extremely busy lives (my mom had 5 kids) and didn't have time for hobbies. Both of my grandmas were farm wives and one also taught a one room country school classroom from 1st-6th grade. One of my grandmas actually did embroider a little when she was young and tried to teach my mom when she was young, but my mom hated it haha however, I am so glad I didn't learn to embroider when I was young and got to be on the farm and help milk cows, feed calves, gather eggs, make lunches for my grandpas and be a kid on the farm. I will never take that for granted. ANYWAYS, I first started with cross stitch funny enough. One afternoon I was strolling through Joann's (RIP, miss you) and I bought a cross-stitch kit before going on a road trip to Minnesota with my husband. I wanted to do something in the car instead of doomscrolling and I also needed a baby shower gift for my soon to be nephew. So, I thought I could kill two birds with one stone.
Not going to lie, it was a little difficult to understand how to cross stitch because I had never done anything like it before. But once I got it, it was fun. Once I finished the pattern that I was working on, I wanted to do more of them. I looked on Instagram and on Etsy to see if I could find any other patterns that I liked. While I was on Instagram, I of course got bombarded with a bunch of ads for different cross stitch accounts and then some embroidery accounts. I checked them out and one of the embroidery accounts was hosting a free online embroidery workshop for a week. I signed up, got my supplies, and watched all the live videos. It was the best thing ever and I became obsessed with embroidery and said goodbye to cross stitch.
Of course, I then turned to Pinterest for embroidery ideas. I am one that needs to have a purpose for doing something if I'm going to do it. I am not really that way anymore, but back then I didn't believe in hobbies or "free time". I had zero hobbies until I started embroidering regularly, especially since I was a mom to a three-year-old and almost one year old at the time. I was exhausted at the end of the day and had a long night ahead of me as my babies still woke up during the night.
One of the ideas that came up was an embroidered name sweater. I saw them all over Instagram and decided that I definitely needed to make one for my son's first birthday that was coming up and then I was going to make one for my daughter as well. I got the sweaters and all the supplies. But... life. I never got around to it for his birthday, so I made them for Christmas instead. They were honestly not the best-looking sweaters looking back, but they were cute and others (my husband, mom and sister 😆) thought so too. I didn't post about them because I was not super in love with how they looked until almost a year after I started my business when I did a little look back on how far I had come.
I loved embroidery, I loved making the sweaters, I loved that I finally had something for myself and a creative outlet. I never thought of myself as creative or able to be creative until embroidery. I now believe that we are all created to be creative since we are a reflection of the ultimate Creator who is so incredibly creative (just look at everything around you and you yourself!). Since starting embroidery, I looked forward to the night instead of dreading it for the first time since kids (iykyk) because it was my time to sit down and do something just for myself. It also helped with my PPA and PPD. I followed some other embroidery artists on Instagram and saw that they were successful in their businesses so I thought- why not me? There wasn't anything like it in my area at the time, so I thought it'd be a really fun thing to bring to the community. So without any business knowledge whatsoever, I decided to start an embroidery business in January 2022.
When I first started, I thought I wanted to do embroidery kits and making my own patterns. However, people wanted cute sweaters, so I went with that. I absolutely love making sweaters and getting creative with the designs. But honestly, they aren't big sellers in the area that I live in. To be honest, I have s t r u g g l e d for the past 3 years that I've been doing this business. I used to work full time on top of this business where I would stay up until 3-4AM and dropped my kids off at school and daycare and be at work by 8AM. Then I'd get done at work, do all the nightly routine stuff at home, put the kids down for bed and stay up working on my business. It was insane and I burned out hard in 2024. I felt like I was on a hamster wheel most of the time.
I know some embroidered sweater/ embroidery artists are super successful where they are and sell their sweaters for $100+ and sell out immediately. Where I live, that would never happen. I used to only pay myself $5/hour that I worked on something, sometimes less. I no longer undervalue myself but I still struggle with pricing things because I don't have a big audience/following. I've wanted to quit so many times, but I believe in this business too much to throw in the towel just yet. However, if things continue to go like they have the past 3 years, I sadly don't think I'll be able to keep this business open for much longer.
I now have started to dip my toes into teaching embroidery classes in my area. They have been such a breath of fresh air and have sparked my creative side once again. I love getting to teach others about the art form that I love and hope they also fall in love with it. I know it's considered a "granny" hobby, but I really don't think that's the case anymore. More and more younger people are wanting to find something to do that isn't scrolling on their phones and connecting with people in real life. I hope to be a catalyst in this desire to be more connected and have more community. The classes I have taught so far have been a dream come true.
I think embroidery kits, stick and stitch patches, doing online embroidery videos and the like will be in my near future. I really am gravitating towards that right now, but we will see! I also have started sewing and quilting. I don't know if that's something that will become a permanent part of LDC, but who knows. I try not to put limits on myself, because then I just end up eating my words when I end up doing something I said I wasn't going to do. I'm sure I missed some things in the story, but this is long enough haha
I hope you enjoyed this super long, personal blog post. Thanks for reading!
xo
Joci