Back in March of this year I was invited to speak to a group of creative and entrepreneurial women about the evolution of my weaving business, and to answer their questions about some of the decisions that I have made. They asked great questions! It really got me thinking about the winding road that I am travelling on, and sparked far more thoughts than I could share at the time, so I thought I’d put some of my musings here on my blog.
Yes, I’ve been slow to act on that thought, but I’m here now with question one. These are not intended to be general principles applicable to all, but just my own experience and reflections.
Question: How did you take the leap?
Did I have money saved up? Did I line up lots of commissions? Was I offered one big lucrative commission?
The answer to this one is simple: I didn’t leap at all. My transformation from full-time employed person to fully self-employed person was essentially a creep rather than a leap. Occasionally I have had to take a bigger step to get from one stage to the next, but I reckon I have always had one foot on the ground somewhere.
In every decision to do something, there are a host of factors at play. There are many paths we could take — each with its advantages and disadvantages — and there are also paths we may not be able to take, because of wherever it is we are starting from. Since I hadn’t even begun learning to weave until I was in my mid-thirties, I was necessarily starting in a place where I had existing commitments, but I was also in a place where I had support — the commitment and the support being essentially two sides of the same marriage!
Nor do we all have the same appetite for risk in its various forms. When it comes to finances, I am quite a cautious person. I like to be able to look ahead, be fairly confident about what my expenses are going to be, and know how I am going to pay for them. I don’t always have that security, because life happens — and as a household we have been through all sorts of ups and downs in our circumstances — but again, coming to this business lark a bit later means that I have had plenty of experience of adjusting my costs to suit my means and I know how to live well on onions and lentils.
Side note
There’s a fabulous little book called Profit First by Mike Michalowitz, in which he sets out a regime for managing costs within a small business. It’s a regime that forces you to put ‘profit first’ and therefore to manage your costs within what remains, rather than to run up costs and then wonder why your business isn’t making any money.
He proposes a scheme of many separate bank accounts for different categories of expense (which in the UK banking system might well raise eyebrows), but you don’t need those to make it work. These days many small business accounts offer ‘buckets’ which do the same job, and I now have one of those, but for a long time I just kept my money in notional buckets on a spreadsheet — if you are the conscientious budgeting type, then it works just as well.
But back to the creep. It may be obvious from some of the themes that appear in my work, but my previous line of work was all about data. I’ve had all sorts of different roles, from building databases to teaching data modelling techniques, but there’s always been data somewhere. And I am absolutely passionate about data literacy, but I will restrain myself from setting off on my hobby horse about that. Anyway, when I left my last full time role, I started teaching part time for the Open University, and mainly taught first and second year undergraduate statistics.
This was a great job for a maker to have in the background because it could be scaled up one year — teach more modules or more classes, take on extra marking etc — and scaled down the next. It was also seasonal, and a calendar would set out exactly when I would be most busy during the year, so I could plan around it. Most importantly of all, here in Scotland we have a fantastic little band of maths and stats people, who are a delight to work with — and in the end, that was the hardest thing to give up, even when I no longer needed the money!
Some data-inspired weaving from the archive
I was down to one class a year, ostensibly a full-time equivalent of 0.11 or about half a day a week, but it was necessarily taking up more of my brain space than that, and finally I needed to let it go so that I could do other things. But I think it is worth pausing to highlight that particular benefit of a job outside one’s own business. There is a lot to be said for having colleagues — peers who are not only doing the same sort of thing as you, but whose interest is embedded in the same organisation or service, whether that’s a local business, a council department, or a small corner of a multi-national corporation. When your business is entirely your own, there is nobody who is invested in it like you are, and that can be lonely. While you are finding your way, your community, your networks, it isn’t daft to hold onto that collegiality in another endeavour and make the most of it.
I’d also like to add that it is perfectly normal to have a job besides your own business, and I know dozens of established artists and makers who do different kinds of work (we might want to reflect on the economics of this, but that’s another story). Because it isn’t a part of the maker’s life that we typically see on Instagram, it is easy to think that it doesn’t exist, but it is important to remember that we are only seeing what the maker selects for us to see. And the reasons for the omission may not be what we think, either. I’ve never made a secret of my OU teaching, but it also isn’t something I tended to plaster all over my blog or social media — though you’ll find it mentioned here and there if you look back over the years — because I knew that my students were googling me! My discretion was actually driven by the job itself rather than by the desire to appear more self-sufficient as a weaver.
Not a leap, but a creep was posted by Cally on 15 May 2025 at https://callybooker.co.uk
Marlene Toerien
Thank you for this, I started weaving as part of my therapy of recovering from serious orthepedic operations but I also knew this would be my art/craft that I will do for the rest of my life. I was a financial typist for 4 years before my babies, and I knew this is not what I want to do working for a boss, with an understanding husband who allowed me to weave and start up a weaving selling group, living in South Africa Weaving is not recognised as an art form as pottery but I earn enough to carry on.
Cally
Thanks for sharing your experience, Marlene. I do think that having the support of your partner is crucial, especially when you are starting out.