CRAFT w/THE BAND "Joe Jack Talcum"

This past weekend I experienced an adolescent dream come true. Joe Jack Talcum, of The Dead Milkmen fame, came to my little shop in the Old North End of Burlington and played his music. The music and the voice that I have been hearing in my head for decades! As an ostracized angst-y arts-y teenager, I found community and friendship through the words and music of Joe Jack Talcum. My 15 yr old self is so damn proud of my 36 yr old self, it is astounding! I cannot believe that as a grown up Mama business owner that I still have the opportunity to play music and act like a "rockstar". With two musically inclined children, I now have the additional pleasure of getting to rock out with my kids and teach them the songs that soothed my teenage soul. What joy!

Super big Thanks to Jarmac, Eva, Rachel, Catherine & Michael for making all this happen.

Sewing...Next Generation Style

Recently I began an heroic teaching adventure when I decided to take on a very eager 5 (and a half) year old sewing student. My teaching abilities have been flexed to the max in an attempt to match her enthusiasm and desire with her very real limitations and age appropriate abilities. Most often I teach grown ups, but being a Mama myself, I also teach my own children (hopefully something) every day. Teaching is a fascinating constantly changing landscape. Whether I am working with five year olds or fifty year olds, the constant need to re-direct and reassure, to shift gears at the slightest frustration yet continue to allow for the important sense of control is paramount. Some days it seems that my primary purpose is to give my students the permission to make mistakes, to experiment, to explore. There is such pressure in our society to achieve and strive for perfection, rather than exploration and experimentation for arts sake, or for life's sake.

My daughter is (almost) ten and has been sewing for several years now, not without struggle, tears and frustration. Mothers teaching Daughters is a universal story of trial and tears, struggle and patience. I hear the tale almost daily at my shop of Grandmothers & Great Grandmothers almost "magical" sewing abilities, followed up by second wave Mothers whose disdain for sewing was acute, followed by their own daughters who are inept novices at the arts of home economics; yet yearn for the lost knowledge of their formothers, particularly when they become Mothers themselves.

I identify with this generational tug-of-war with "women's work". My own Mother was an amazing seamstress who took on the task of creating her sister's entire wedding ensemble (gown, bridesmaid's dresses, groom-men's cumber buns & bow ties) every night at the kitchen table for weeks and weeks on end. Needless to say she no longer sews and is completely bemused by my chosen profession. She did not teach me to sew; nor did she learn from her Mother, my Nana, herself an inspired designer with exquisite skills who kept her nine children clothed by her efficient use of her Singer treadle.

While working with the next generation, teaching my own daughter and her friends the art of bobbin winding, I wonder if I will ever possess the skill and craft(wo)manship of my Nana. I wish I had paid more attention when I was a child sitting at her knee, oblivious to the vast knowledge and decades of practice in her fingertips. Will Daughters everywhere continue to reinvent the wheel rather than to learn, actually listen and learn from the wisdom of our Mothers?

Babe-in-Arms + Children-in-Tow

I have a good Mama friend who is an amazing and inspired Dancer and Choreographer. She is also a Mama to two kids under six. She has been working on a dance performance for over two years now titled "Before and After: Kids" It is a beautiful community collaboration of adults and children dancing together and separately, moving with bodies colliding; children suspended from their parents who are just trying to keep moving, just trying to schlep to find a moment of peace. The dance is an appropriate metaphor for life with children. The rehearsals, even more so.

I had the pleasure of participating in this controlled artistic chaos last spring, along with my two children. As a small business owner, interested in advancing a more Mother-friendly environment, It was thrilling for me to watch my friend direct, dance and mother simultaneously. The scene at rehearsals certainly was not what one might expect from movie scenes of prim and proper dance studios and instructors. Instead the room was loud and sticky, swirling with creativity and positive play energy. Often, my friend would be in the middle of her dance solo, only to have her toddler collapse into a fit of need to be with his mother; to be connecting with her body in some way. I know this Mama-Baby dance well, as my youngest is also a toddler, now cruising through the proverbial terrible two's. During the first year of opening my business, I completed almost all of my tasks from teaching, to finance, to sewing design with babe-in-arms and often older child-in-tow. I often wonder about my child-free self and what I ever did with all that time, all that quiet, all that money? I can hardly remember, it all seems like a dream.

Our inaugural "tweet + stitch"

Recently, it seems all the world is a twitter. From the cable news shows to the daytime talk-tv, NPR and even VT's very own SevenDays. "tweet" this and "re-tweet" that is all you hear chirping over the airwaves. At VBSR's recent business conference here in Burlington it seemed as though all of the workshops and networking chatter revolved around twitter and the trend of social networking.

I must confess, that we Bobbin Mamas have not been immune to the twitter-bug. After three weeks of grumbling and fumbling my way through the twitterverse learning curve, I found myself addicted. I followed along eagerly watching the live-stream tweets from the statehouse; as Vermont finally determined that separate is not equal and legalized marriage between same-sex couples. I was thrilled when Singer Sewing, Amy Butler and Chelsea Green Publishing started following our updates and am super loving connecting with all the Vermont tweeps out there in twitterland.

So...in honor of our new obsession, we decided to host today's inaugural "tweet + stitch" at The Old North End's newest wifi hotspot The Bobbin Sew Bar + Craft Lounge. The discussion ranged from the differences between teaching sewing skills to men vs. women, crocheted hyperbolic psudospheres and plans for The Ramble coming up in July. A designated tweeter has proven to be crucial...because everyone's hands are in constant motion. I've attached some lovely pictures of works-in-progress from the day. Follow along for the next one on Thursday May 21st 2-4pm.

Growing A Business

My partner and I are growing a business. In existence for almost two years now, The Bobbin Sew Bar + Craft Lounge is an awkward pre-teen; creating itself, branding and building itself day by day. I wonder sometimes if all businesses are like children, eventually they take on a life, an identity of their own. At the beginning of our business adventure, we are busy dreaming, imagining and doing our way into being. Like a newborn, some days I look at my business and do not recognize it… I cannot imagine how I will ever find the patience and discipline it will take to guide it and grow it forward. I am often nagged by a gnawing sense of awareness that there is so much that I do not know yet, about business, about sewing, about teaching and money. My inner thirteen year old visits me, as I experience a “fear of rejection” by the marketplace and by my peers, that I, as The Bobbin, will be discovered as a fraud; as a child “playing dress-up”, pretending to own a business.

Thankfully, I experience external validation through the words of Paul Hawken who in “Growing A Business” echoes my own thoughts regarding the “bootstrapping” of a business. “…while a bootstrapping apparently lacks planning, there is a planning process going on. Many marketwise entrepreneurs just cannot articulate in an understandable fashion what they are doing. They are not thinking verbally, but visually, spatially, or in some other fashion. They can recognize the rationality of what they do only in retrospect…The flagrantly successful bootstrap companies were direct extensions of the personalities of their energetic and spirited founders, whose dynamic styles played such an important role in the successful founding of these new businesses.”

I am certain that my partner and I could easily be described as dynamic, flagrant, or eccentric personalities. But is that enough? When researching The Bobbin’s business contemporaries, Urban Sew Studios in New York, San Francisco and Austin, Texas, have become successful neighborhood businesses educating their public regarding the joys of sewing and refashioning clothing. Is Burlington ready? Will up-cycled clothing lines and green community skill building really grow into a marginally profitable business? Just because we have been able to find successfully businesses similar to our own, will the ideas really translate? Or has the game completely changed now due to our current global economic meltdown? Does Burlington know it needs a Sew Bar + Craft Lounge ran by unapologetically feminist mothers?

During these days, these moments of anxiety and self-doubt, I remember the dozens of business owners I have worked for during my years as an hourly laborer. Conjuring up the memories of these often alcoholic/angry or moody/depressed individuals finds me fairing quite well by comparison. If they could do it, well than surely, so can I. Some of them, inexplicably, managed to run quite successful business ventures. The common thread I saw amongst these entrepreneurs was a willingness to leap off the proverbial cliff in pursuit of the dream. I feel as though my partner and I have been careful in our calculated risk of jumping into a “bootstrapped” business. We have no employees, limited overhead, no suppliers, no venders; just a basement full of used clothes, fabrics/notions, a pile of sewing machines, a library of reference books and our own creative ingenuity.

We are allowing ourselves to grow slowly, to use this time to observe, to play, to experiment. We are learning how to practice what we preach; how to participate in our dream of owning a business and effectively merging our children and family responsibilities. Most importantly, as a self-described “mother-friendly” business, we are the ones responsible for creating the terms, definitions and the multiple bottom-lines with which we use to define our own success.