Slowly the New Door Opens
On New Year’s Eve a year ago, I was across the street at an early party at our neighbors’ house. I don’t know how the discussion started but somehow I mentioned to Ann something about not being able to find clothes that I had in mind and she said I should make my own clothes, that she had done it years ago.
I also had made some of my own clothes at one point but then thought– because I was doing other things– that I wouldn’t be sewing anymore so I gave away almost all of my patterns and some of my fabric.
A year later things have definitely changed. Here I am having opened Chelle Summer, making and selling bucket bags while also looking to the future of other items I can make, particularly clothing related.
While there are many questions of where this road will go, I can look back and see how it gradually opened up to me. And I’m grateful for the new opportunity. There is a huge amount of challenge in it, but I think I was ready for that.
I can still remember back in late 1999 when my former-husband and I opened his sales business in our home. We had a new phone line put in (we didn’t yet have a cell phone, that wouldn’t come for a few more years) and I bought a beige trimline phone from Target.
The caveat? It had no hold button.
We felt so unprofessional at times when I would answer the phone and have to hand it to him, trying not to make any noise. But slowly things fell together– mostly because of a lot of hard work but lucky breaks always help and are necessary– and eventually we graduated to several phone lines, several cell phones, and a phone for the main business number that had a hold button on it.
It’s both exhilarating and hard at the same time to watch a business grow from nothing. I read stories of growth from people, of where they began to where they are today, and remind myself that I have to be patient, that it all will come together. That I have never been afraid of hard work and I know it will be worth it.
What I don’t know is exactly where that road will lead, especially because a year ago this time, it led somewhere I couldn’t have predicted.
