I am currently making and selling handbags online, keeping up on my blog and my personal website and building up my customer base and spending a great amount of time enjoying the whole journey. I use reclaimed leather and upholstery and leftovers from manufacturers as well as recycled materials and find so much satisfaction in doing this. It challenges me and I feel that in some way what I am doing has a positive impact on the world. I welcome the challenge of creating designs with a very small and limited supply of scrap materials and enjoy creating my own patterns in a challenging way. I just work with what is in front of me. Everything is original and one of a kind.

I have had so many clients tell me that buying a handbag that is made form reclaimed materials makes them feel good, and hearing this from my customers has been a huge inspiration to me. It gives me the motivation to keep on going. I think the world is changing the way we use everyday items and the awareness is shifting and people feel good knowing that they are contributing in a small way by cutting back on excess waste. Another thing that makes my bags special is that fact that I focus on one of a kind, rarely repeating the same bag more than once.

In 2005 I came across a resource for scrap leather and upholstery material to play with. I have always been very crafty and love all forms of art so this was natural for me to want to play and explore this new found material that was available to me. I began making purses for family and gave them away as gifts for the holiday and the reactions I received told me that this was it! I have always wanted to have a career doing what I love so I decided to start a home business making handbags. Everything is handmade by me. My bags are created entirely thorough original ideas out of my nightly sketchbook and I love the challenge of creating useful items out of items that would be of little or no use to others.

Interesting question. A nightmare story? Well I have to say that I am lucky enough to have survived without a whole lot of issues. The biggest nightmare would be the time when I had to take the seams out 5 times in a row and redoing the same mistake over again. Its one of those things where you just have to stop and wonder, " Maybe I should be working in the garden today" or take a break and come back to it later. I usually always pull myself out of it and things work out just fine.

Right after I decided to make this a business, I decided to do a craft show. I made signs for my booth using photography of my daughter and her friend fighting over a bag and did a photoshoot with my youngest child in the garden with one of my garden bags and my booth looked so professional, I though for sure I would do well. People began to make comments to me that my handbags were not handmade. They didn't believe me and because of this, I had half as many sales as I would have liked to. I was so upset by this that I decided to stop everything. I packed everything up and into storage it all went. I stopped sewing and began looking for work.

It wasn't until about a year later I discovered a website where I could sell my work and decided to try it, what do I have to loose? Ill put my bags on and see if they sell. I couldn't believe it! I just a couple weeks time I sold over 10 bags. I was thrilled and began to look at things differently. I realized that this is what made me happiest and I made the commitment to myself that I would keep moving forward without taking peoples opinions personal. I learned so much from that experience and has made me much more confident designer.