Oh Sew Lovely started life very differently to how you see it today…

I am a primary school teacher and my degree was in Education and English! I absolutely love my job, but when I started my own family 15 years ago, I changed to working part time and have done so ever since. I had always painted in my spare time and enjoyed creating large oil paintings, but with young children underfoot, I found it harder and harder to find time and space to paint. So when my daughter received a rag doll for her third birthday, I started sewing clothes for it in my spare time as it was an easy craft to pick up and put down as needed. This quickly led to making dolls clothes to sell and from there I discovered a passion for beautiful fabrics and started making other simple items and selling them at craft fairs. However, my need to draw and paint wasn't really being met, so I started trying to stitch some simple appliqué pictures painstakingly machining with a regular sewing foot. I actually can't remember where I first heard about free-motion sewing, but it was a revelation and life changing!! I didn't even know if my 50 year old machine could do it (you need to be able to disengage the part of the machine that holds fabric in place and not all machines can do this as it would make normal sewing impossible). By luck it could, but my first few attempts were very shaky to say the least! I soon got the hang of it and was away! It's kind of like holding a pencil stationary above a piece of paper and moving the paper to create a drawing, but the fabric is your paper and the sewing machine is your pen.

I've been free-motion sewing for about 8 years now and never looked back. I can honestly say that it fulfils my need to draw and create, but who knows, maybe one day I'll pick up a paintbrush again!

I have been designing my free motion designs as Oh Sew Lovely for 6 years now. I have a unit in The Emporium, Wellington, where I have been trading for the past three years and also have my work in the beautiful 'Rocket and Bird' in Taunton and 'The Crispin Emporium' in Street. Between these three shops, teaching and my own family, I am a fairly busy woman, so I put off selling online before now. But the time is finally right and I feel very happy with where I have got my business to, especially as I have no formal art training.

Before I go, I thought I'd share a little bit about my desire to make my business as ethical as possible. I've spent a long time searching for earth-friendly products, as I've been fighting the good fight for over 30 years now, since I first wandered into a Friends of the Earth meeting aged 17! When I was elected as a prefect in my 6th form, I insisted on creating a new role of environment officer and initiated the first recycling scheme at our school, back when that wasn't even a thing (I had to organise for the FOE crusher to come to the school once a month to crush all the cans I'd collected and physically take them to the recycling centre as there were no recycling collections back then-hard to believe now!).

The point of this story is to show how passionate I am, and always have been, about the environment and about making my business as ethical as possible. I've sourced biodegradable cellos & recycled backing board for my prints, my tissue paper is acid free and FSC approved, my greeting cards and postcards are printed on recycled paper and my envelopes are also recycled. I've even sourced biodegradable packing tape and cellotape spots for sealing my wrapping & parcels. I still need to find a source for my stickers, but it's a good start. And I want to do more!

I do hope you've enjoyed hearing a little about my business and that you love my designs as much as I love creating them! I am very lucky-I love both my jobs and the slightly meandering path that led me to this point!

Lots of Love

Bek x