Last year in late July my friend Michelle and I decided to sell quilts at a fair, Peach Days in Brigham City, Utah. I have thought about doing this kind of a thing for a while and finally decided on a venue.
Making quilts is a LONG process and not really all that profitable with the price of fabric and time investment. This being said I started quilting for this in January.
Some of my favorites were the Christmas stockings and the table runners.
Some of the display, I loved this rack I stole from my mother in laws laundry room!
Michelle split the booth with me, she has such great stuff, and most of it is from her own patterns MIXI heart.
Maybe I made too much!
Needless to say I quilted my butt off for six months! I was so proud of what I got done and so enthusiastic for the fair. I unfortunately put my whole heart into the endeavor and had my expectations of failure at a minimum. All the while I was training for a marathon. (This takes a lot of emotional as well as a physical toll on me)
Long story short, if I hadn't done this with my best friend and seriously successful quilting friend I wouldn't have gotten myself over this failure. It was AWFUL! More awful that I ever would have imagined. I felt like I was begging people to look at my stuff and that my level of pathetic- ness reached an all new high.
We were right next to a booth selling Mormon temple and Jesus pictures and right across from a booth selling concealed weapon handbags. They were BOOMING! I could not believe how busy they were the whole weekend.
My (our) booth was Soooooo slow. We had some quilters do the quick walk through but I was ready to pay someone to just look at even one of my quilts. I don't think if I was giving a queen size quilt away I would have been able to find someone who would want it! I am seriously not exaggerating! What even made it worse was my Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Wayne, and my Sister in law and her friend all drove up from Tooele county 2 1/2 hours to support me and come see my booth! This should have been a mood booster for me but instead I just felt like people I know are seeing me fail. Kind of like falling in front of people and even though it hurts, the embarrassment is all you notice at first.
It was probably one of the lowest times of my entire life. Like really really low. Which is silly really and so pathetic! At one point I was seriously sucidal (which is from more than just this but just that I was really low about a lot of things, and I was just ready to check out of life).
Which reminds me of a almost laughable thing that happened at peach days... I was so doing my pathetic pretend like I'm having fun, please come into my booth/this is so awful I just want to go home and die. And thinking about death, a lady and her husband came right up to my booth grabbed 2 x mas stocking and said I want to buy these and handed me the $$ for them. She was wearing a sucide prevention t shirt. Talk about freakie weird timing, I kept thinking did she know??? Could she feel I was that low and thinking about it! I almost said something but really, what am I going to say. I want to die because my quilts are no good.
Really I'm sure there is plenty more than just a bad quilt/ and or a big failure for one weekend going towards my depression or whatever it was I was going through.
When Peach Days was over I hadn't even made the money back that I had invested into materials to make the stuff for it, and the booth space. OUCH!!!
I came home with almost everything I took! No lie!
I finally gave myself the time to heal emotionally, and now after about six months I am back to loving quilting again. I really tried to force myself to get into it before now but my heart wasn't there. I never really stopped quilting, but my heart did. I gave my sewing room a thorough cleaning and started to catch myself up on the things I couldn't push myself to work on.
It's taken me 6 months but finally I'm better.
So here's to a new chapter. A fresh start with a fresh 2015. I'm going to journal my projects and enjoy this again. I love the fun amazing projects I am always getting to try with my best friends and I can't wait to see what I and they finish this year!
Such an awesome post!! I had no idea you were so low at that time. It is crazy how we can appear like everything is just fine but inside things won't necessarily match. It is good that you realize where you were and have good self reflection! Love you Katie and you did fantastic :)
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