Building Sew Eco Fabrics has been an incredible journey, which is why I'm terrified of what's next.
But I am going to be brutally honest first.
This last year has been one of the hardest years of my life, both professionally and personally.
I don't know how I've landed myself into such an inspiring, supportive and passionate community of sewists, but here we are. I wouldn't have made it this far if it wasn't for all the support I've received over the past nearly four years.
From impromptu celebratory dances when I finished a challenging sewing project, to Instagram messages with long-distance friends sharing their makes, or the dedicated customers who stayed up till midnight to get their hands on my seasonal sewing boxes.
It's the little moments that have kept me going. Best of all, it's the friendships I've made along the way. Friends I deeply cherish and genuinely couldn't imagine my life without anymore. All because I picked up a sewing machine.
For better or worse, the business and I have grown side by side for almost four years.
It's why this is so difficult to write. Whether you noticed or not, I've been extremely quiet lately. I've not been showing up where I should be and the business has suffered for it.
Many of you celebrated with me last April, when I quit my retail job to go full-time with the business. After building the business for the first 3 years alongside working retail and hospitality jobs, I finally took the leap to go all in.
It felt like a dream come true. I was travelling around the country with Rosie on the Road (pop up shop tour), meeting customers at sewcials and events, and growing the business. Little did I know, that job I quit, was my scaffolding holding me in place (don't worry this will soon make sense).
I also launched the Summer Picnic Box last year, which remains my favourite seasonal box I've ever created. The colours, the project, the experience of opening it, all just came together perfectly. Everything looked like it was going well.
But what I didn't realise was my brain was quietly falling apart behind the scenes.
I was being taken hostage behind my very eyes.
Who knew that quitting a part-time job would be the final ingredient in destroying my nervous system.
I thought I was just exhausted from touring around the country, popping up the shop at sewing sewcials. But turns out it's not that simple. After returning from events, I found myself unable to get started on even simple tasks. And although this was always a struggle throughout my whole life, suddenly everything felt louder.
Even finding the motivation to sit and edit a video (that I knew would take only 10 minutes) for social media felt impossible.
My head was full of ideas, but I couldn't organise them enough to know where to start. And if I somehow managed to pick one, I would become paralysed trying to work out how to get the idea to the finished result. It wasn't just work-related either, my homelife was falling apart too.
Meanwhile weeks were passing by and the only time I seemed to work efficiently was when something became urgent. Suddenly I could focus, prioritise and take action. Yet daily I found myself battling with myself to just start.. anything.
By late July, I found myself in bouts of depression and waking up in the middle of the night with anxiety attacks. I kept pushing through, convinced I simply wasn't working hard enough. I started to find myself chronically fatigued, yet feeling still like I've not done enough. Always falling behind, and forever failing to meet the standards I knew I was capable of.
At the same time, the business began slowing down. There were external challenges too, including a frustrating three-week battle with a bot attack on the website that damaged my search visibility.
But the biggest issue was that I simply wasn't able to show up consistently for the business anymore. The emails weren't going out regularly. Social media became inconsistent. New ideas stayed trapped in notebooks instead of becoming reality.
The harder I pushed, the worse things seemed to get. It was only when my mental health dramatically declined and I suddenly found myself unable to leave the bed or "egg" chair (garden chair I loved), that I finally accepted I needed help.
In December I was diagnosed with ADHD,
and suddenly everything started to make sense.
Turns out removing routine, structure and accountability all at once, was the worst thing I could have done for my ADHD brain. Because ADHD primarily impacts executive functioning (planning, focus, working memory) and having those three tools, help to compensate for the lack of regulation and results in lower stress levels and minimises the decision fatigue. Think of it like an external scaffolding for the ADHD brain. Not only did I fire the scaffolders, but I did that without knowing the brickwork was laid with limited cement, and the scaffolding was there to stop it from getting worse.
I've spent the last six months learning more about myself than I ever thought was possible. Like most late-diagnosed adults, I thought everyone struggled this way.
From day one of ADHD medication, I just cannot move past: THIS is your normal? How can the brain be so peaceful? This quiet?
Suddenly sounds all around me felt dimmer. Not gone, just no longer demanding my attention. I could hear everything, but I wasn't pulled by it constantly. Again...THIS is your normal?
To realise how overwhelming everything has been before, no wonder overstimulation is so common. The world and our own thoughts can feel incredibly loud when your brain doesn't filter it in the same way. And the emotional regulation? Now you're just gloating!
The medication is life changing, and my nervous system clearly needed it. I spent the first hour blubbering. It was like someone rebooted me and cleared the glitches that prevented me from running smoothly.
This of course happened after I had opened my laptop to work, and was curious how it would affect my executive dysfunction and task paralysis. Usually it starts with me getting overwhelmed by all my notes and task list on my Notion dashboard. The day typically would go downhill from there. But this time my brain was quiet, everything that was in the front of my head felt like it had been pushed to the back.
Opening my dashboard and I read the page. I repeat, I READ THE PAGE. No thoughts jumping in mid read, no sounds from the room distracting me from focus. Just like that, all the information I was reading sunk in and I had processed it, like time had frozen. Next, I'm choosing a task to take priority. This is usually when the mind is so busy, I can't separate my thoughts and it becomes overwhelmed. Usually then fight or flight kicks in and I shut my laptop because it's too much information. Nope, not this time.
I chose a task and just like that, I'm starting to work.
For many people that probably sounds completely ordinary.
For me, it was like someone just gave me permission to stop holding my breath.
Which takes us up to the last few months. Though burnout, the ideas, the drive to grow the business has never stopped. But I knew to recover and repair my mental heath, I had to take it easy and take every day as it comes.
Which is why I've been continuing to pop up the shop at Lymington Market on the first Saturday of every month. It's kept the toes dipped into the business (eww, why did I go with this analogy?) and the operational costs paid. But it doesn't mean the business is okay.
Sadly time isn't on my side anymore.
This is where I'm at a crossroads.
The business is at a critical point, and it's either bounce it back, or say goodbye.
I'm not writing this out of sympathy. I'm writing this because I've always tried to be honest with this community, and right now that feels more important than pretending everything is fine.
The business is carrying financial pressure from a period when I was investing in growth, travelling the country, launching new products and building what I hoped would be the next stage of Sew Eco Fabrics. When my mental health declined and burnout took over, my ability to work dropped dramatically, and the finances have only got worse.
At the moment, I'm exploring the best way forward and hoping to bring the business back fighting. Over the coming weeks, I'll be sharing some new products in hope to raise some funds to bounce back.
The mission hasn't changed, just the way I'm working to protect both my mental health and the future of Sew Eco Fabrics. Sewing has given me friendships, purpose and a creative outlet that changed my life. I'm not ready to give up on that.
I write this in the hope that I can find more sewists that I've not yet connected with, and to those who have supported me along the way, who might continue to cheer Sew Eco Fabrics on. Even something as simple as sharing a post, or telling your friends about the shop, can make a bigger difference than you can possibly realise.
As always thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting a small business through the highs and the lows. You're sew appreciated ❤️
