I loved blogging about my bag making and having benefitted from online tutorials, I wanted to give back and created several free bag tutes myself. The response from readers was incredible and I kept getting requests for more and more tutorials.
From 2009, I started selling my handmade bags at craft markets. Producing stock on top of blogging kept me really busy. I was also sickish since end of 2007 with an illness that left me feeling exhausted. Blogging, making and selling bags kept me sane and alive. Eventually my condition became manageable and I stopped feeling exhausted.
End of 2010, I produced my first bag pattern which I intended to sell. But I was too shy about it and didn't push myself to market it. My first pattern was written in Word and I felt it wasn't the best software to produce bag patterns. One day I confided in a blog reader that I had a pattern I wanted to sell and one thing led to another and she tested it for me. She made the pouch successfully and I was going to start selling it on Etsy but I held back.
I thought long and hard about it and decided I should get a better software that could draw more complicated bag patterns. After looking around for a while, I realised that most software cost a lot of money. I wasn't confident I could recoup the investment. I mean how many patterns would I need to sell just to get back the money on the software alone? Finally I decided I would get the cheapest software available which turned out to be Coreldraw.
Coreldraw is very hard to learn and I struggled with it until one day I was able to produce my bag pattern. Finally in June 2011, I published my first bag pattern for sale - Perfect Size Reversible Lunchtime Pouch.
I waited and waited for over an hour and no one bought it. Of course it was silly to expect to make a sale right away but I felt I needed some validation and also to prove to hubs that I hadn't wasted his money and my thousands of hours.
And then it happened. I was checking my email all the time and the first sale came in. I will always treasure that precious moment. I can't describe how I felt. But it felt real good. I think I must have screamed and screamed. And then screamed some more.
I went on to publish several bag patterns using Coreldraw until 2013 when I coughed up the cash and bought Adobe Indesign and Illustrator. I felt that Coreldraw was holding me back and wanted to use a better software.
Indesign and Illustrator took months to learn. If Coreldraw was hard, Indesign and Illustrator was worse. I couldn't afford to pay for classes so I ploughed through library guide books. Eventually I knew enough to produce a few patterns using this new software.
Around 2014, I used Illustrator and watcom tablet to create applique for sale. I put 2 for sale and made a few sales. I was too busy with my real life to produce more applique and finally I felt having 2 applique for sale was just silly. So I took them off the market and it was only this year 2015 when I could find the time to produce more applique. Finally I put the completed applique for sale. I was in the midst of producing more applique and I have several in progress when I hurt my right arm. I am right handed.
As of now I have to recuperate and wait for my arm to heal. I don't know how long it will take. It frightens me a little my arm may never be the same. I have so many more exciting patterns to produce. I can't wait to get back to making them.
For more of my bag patterns and applique patterns, go to my Etsy shop here.
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