Part 2: How my art and craft obsession unwittingly became a career.

This is the second post in a series about how The Willa Workshops on willawanders.com came to be. It’s kind of a long story, and I don’t know how many people will find it interesting, but the response to my first post in this series has been very warm, so I’m just going to continue to go with that.

Part 2

After a few years of being a full time art student, my husband and I wanted to start a family. When I was 29 we were blessed with our first child, and the transition from full time hobby artist with zero pressure to 24/7 mommy was really, really shocking to my mental health. I was in mourning over the loss of all of that creative play time. A kind therapist explained it to me: everything in life is only a season. Just because I was in a season that didn’t allow much creative time, didn’t mean that this was forever.

Little did I know what the near future was going to hold for me . . .

After some rough new mommy months and trying to figure out how to care for a newborn baby, I figured out something creative I could actually still do. I could put Sophia in a bouncy chair on our kitchen table and I could do scrapbooking and paper crafting while she watched.

It was the perfect combination of mothering and crafting. I could take countless photos of my new baby and then turn the photos into scrapbooks. I’ve got volumes and volumes of scrapbooks from her first 18 months . . . LOL!

This scrapbooking foray would end up transitioning into my first real career as an artist.

When our daughter was one, we made a big move from Los Angeles to Shaker Heights, Ohio, the town that my husband grew up in. Within a few months of moving, I met a woman who decided that I was going to be her ticket to getting out of her horrible marriage.

She saw things in me that got her very excited about what we could do together. She hatched her own plan about starting a paper crafting business with me (she wanted to be both a single stay-at-home mom AND a small business owner). I was happy to teach her everything I knew about paper, crafting and design and we became very close friends very quickly.

But, I had already decided years ago that I did not want to start a craft business EVER because I had convinced myself that this was a very dumb way to earn a living.

It took her a few months but she finally got me to capitulate. I finally said “Okay, I will start a business with you.”

I’m sure it was the fact that my husband and I were slowing running out of money after our big move to the Midwest (he was starting his own small business at that time).

The simple fact that I had actually said “yes,” totally changed my attitude that day. Suddenly, a force greater than myself took over and I was all in on her crazy idea for a handmade card making business, and I somehow had a vision for what it just might become.

And so began a fifteen year business partnership full of the highest highs and the lowest lows. Let’s just say that our little paper crafting business that began on our dining room tables grew into a multi million dollar, well-respected-in-our-industry, invitation printing company with over 30 employees at its peak.

We designed and manufactured high end, custom invitations and announcements for countless families and events. Our line was eventually distributed at over 350 retailers in North America. We had a booth at the National Stationery Show. We won industry awards and a big local award for having one of the fastest growing businesses in the region (The Weatherhead Award). I learned everything I know about business from my partner and the real world experiences that we weathered together . . . until it all got to be too much.

We had a lot of fun running that business together, but it was also unbelievably stressful to do that and grow a family at the same time.

During my time at the company, I birthed two more kids and regrettably put them in daycare by the time they were six weeks old. My assistants had assistants (just kidding . . . sort of). It took a team of people to keep my kids and household running while I worked in the business.

After 15 years, I had totally had enough. Our business was showing signs of real stress on every angle and my kids were showing obvious signs of needing way more of my attention. I both loved and hated my business partner by that point and I felt that if I didn’t leave I was either going to kill her or kill myself . . . that’s how stressed out I was between work pressure, pressure from her to magically somehow fix the business problems that we had, and real big family issues.

Any person who’s ever studied business partnerships won’t be surprised, ours ended in nine months of couples therapy (which did nothing by the way) and a ball of fire after 15 nutty years. 

To be continued . . .

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Well, that was a lot of raw truth. But it feels good to say it out loud! Please share your thoughts in the comments below.