My happiness glow up

So here’s the deal. I was in a bad place, mentally, emotional and financially. I was working part time in a crapy restaurant. I was in my gap year, (a year students take out as a break before they go to university). Felt I lost all my friendships, no money for travel and every shop was shut because of the virus. I was very unhappy or in other words, depressed. I had to change my life. There was a feeling inside of me that was telling me to transform with eager urgency. The universe was testing me to rise up and change. I had to create my own happiness, and this is how it went.

I decide I was going to carpe diem the heck out of the rest of my gap year because I had nothing to loose. I had only 9 months left of my gap year and already 4 months passed me by. I’ve always, always, always dreamed of doing art since I was 13 years old. I, just, glow when I do art! I knew I had an inner artist and wanted to let her roam free and run with the winds. This passion I have for art is exactly how I wanted to feel everyday for the rest of my gap year that I had left. So, I quit my scummy job, hooked my mind onto positive affirmations, and I started to go on my quest to make a business out of something artsy. This is because of two things 1) I only had a bit of savings from the job I just quit and I would need to bring in more money and 2) Whatever I was doing, if it was art, I would be happy.

As I was going about my life, I went down to Camden market - the coolest place in North London - with my friend and we were eating five pound Thai food from the market stall. It was something about the graffiti on the walls, the goths in their outfits and the man in a chicken hat shouting conspiracies through his microphone that aroused a sense of artistic vision in me when I was passing by the dupe designer jumpers and sweatshirts. I grabbed my friend to go into that direction. As my hands were skimming across the sweatshirts I thoughts I could make them better. I thought instead of making the same dupes that everyone is making why not make the dupe but put a creative twist. Right there and then, had a vision of me making these sweatshirts via embroidery or sewing, I had no experience with either craft. I took a look online for the real versions of the Nike sweatshirts but they were ridiculously expensive, priced around £130 on the internet and Depop. So I found Etsy, heaven. I would make cool trendy designs out of the Nike logo, like adding fire flames or hearts to them. I set off straight away.

Now, this is where the fun began.

For 3 focused, tunnel visioned, determined weeks, nothing stopped me, no negative thought, no snapped thread, no old fashioned sewing machine that frightened the jeepers out of me. I was going to make this sweatshirt, and I was going to put my creative mark on it. And I was going to put it out into the world.

So I started by taking a box from my mothers room (thanks mum!) Which was full of sewing needles and very thin thread. I had a pile of unused clothes and took a peach red sweatshirt that I bought a couple years back in a charity shop and used it for practising. After finding some beginning materials, I sketched out the two designs that I was toying with. I had no idea how to make either of these sketches come alive because I had no fashion experience but I thought let’s try embroidery and using the sewing machine and see what one works.

I started with embroidery, I quickly found that the thin thread my mother had was not used for embroidery because it would have taken me 5 hours to thread one letter. So I hassled my beautiful mother to dig up the sewing machine that my grandma passed on to her.

This was a really rewarding process, I spent a day just figuring out how to turn it on and how to make the machine work, the result? I got one proper stitch out of it and I was ecstatic. The next day I was experimenting with the type of stitches the sewing machine could do, the next day after that I was running into problems such as dirty stitches and really loose back stitches which I solved with the help of the fellow sewing community on Youtube. By the end of it, I was very proud of my baby which I cleaned and oiled, I could do a very nice line, so I attempted to stitch up my design on my jumper. But it wasn’t professional quality at all, I couldn’t sell it, and I realised that it was going to be hard to achieve the other creative designs I had in my mind.

I felt like giving up but, at the last corner stone I turned back to my embroidery station and I looked up a more advanced way of embroidering. I ended up ordering an embroidery hoop, embroidery thread and some basic sweatshirts from the internet. This was such an interesting process the thread was so beautiful and it was much thicker and I was leaning how to do stitches. I had a big scissor to cut through the fabric and a small scissor to cut the thread. It took a couple days of giving up, pushing myself, all to figure out how to get the stitches right for my design. From here, I decided on the final design I would go with (out of the two I had been practicing). I decided on the flower embroidery design I had created. I would stitch it in a Nike inspired logo right in the centre of the sweatshirt.

I did I photoshoot with the sweatshirts and created an Etsy account and uploaded my sweatshirts and I’ve never been happier. I am so grateful I taught myself the craft of embroidering because my life is very different from the dark despair of my scummy restaurant job to my now Etsy seller job. Embroidery was my creation of happiness. And you too, whoever is reading this can transform your life.