This one's for you, Nancy

A wild ride, indeed...

You know you've got something when you will work this hard just to be able to keep on doing it. Here we are - nine months (a coincidence, I assure you,) several hundred yards of fabric, reams of drawing paper, an intimate relationship with ULINE and a true and lasting friendship with the UPS guy -- all because of a little idea.

How to find the beginning? I mean, the beginning of the beginning, because I feel like we are just getting started.   Do I start with my mother, Nancy Parker  - the person who taught me to really see birds, and wildflowers, to understand that thunder was a thing of wonder and not of terror, and who thought it was perfectly ok for a child of nine to announce that her favorite colors were brown, black, and grey? (I loved my neutrals!)

Or do I start with the junior high home ec teacher, who made me the master seam ripper I am today? I am also tempted to say that this began with my photography, but if  I said that you'd need to know that I started taking pictures as a result of loving birds and wishing I could stop time and hold them in my hand long enough to really see them. I am sensing a pattern here.

Then, of course, there is my spouse, who rather gingerly inquired several months into the initial
blush and rush of textile designing whether I was becoming a fabric hoarder.  This  was
a reference to another Nancy, who happened to be his own mother's best friend. This Nancy was married to a judge and had spent her life minding her Ps and Qs in deference to her husband's very public career. But a free and artistic spirit in her could not be denied; she purchased bolts and bolts and bolts of fabric - in every imaginable pattern, weight, and color - and squirreled them away in their house until there was no room for anything else. She loved that fabric and always claimed she had big plans for each bolt and was just about to get started. She was a delightful woman, and hysterically funny, so no one really minded about not having a place to hang up his or her coat or being able to open a drawer. But I think that Nancy Arpin wasn't so much a hoarder as an artist without an outlet.  She couldn't help herself when it came to those bolts of colorful fabric. I know all about that.

So here I am, with my fantastic team of sewing people, tech people, marketing people and accounting people (thanks, honey !) and we are off on the journey known as online retailing.  I am finding that it is quite a bit more than drawing a sketch or taking a photograph, and I have no idea how long the journey will take or where I'll be when we get there, but I am pretty sure there is a Nancy mixed up in this.