The time has flown by since we left the big smoke and in the rare, hazy sunshine of Sunday evening we were able to sit in the garden and take stock of how much our life has changed. Lying on a rug, we both sank into the meadow that our little patch of turf has blossomed into, listening to the birds, whilst the little one ran about with a flower pot perched on his head...
Duck Egg came into fruition on our kitchen table, throughout our start up we have toy cars to be mended on piles of business books, 'Start your Business in 7 Days' by James Caan has been placed beneath Annabel Karmel's children's recipes and there has been much painting into the wee small hours as we establish ourselves! I have learnt a whole new skill set whilst living here, yesterday I was laying a path albeit wearing marigolds, mixing cement in powdered baby milk pot and laying the cement with a spoon... Our timetable of dashing to birthday parties, play dates and swimming lessons has been interspersed with investigation of the smaller antique shops of East Sussex joined by the hands of doom of the little one, leaving with only minimal devastation in our wake and armfuls of goodies!
We have met some wonderful and interesting people along the way. And that's what it is all about. The people.
During my fog of baby-dom the notion of how social media can help a company really took off and I am trying to catch up. Through Twitter we have met an amazing array of craftspeople and start-ups, who are incredibly generous with time and suggestions. We have exchanged gardening tips for how best to cope with our human caterpillar and found out about local events, which have really helped us establish roots.
Penshurst Farmer's Market
Facebook has been invaluable too and while the website is still being deliberated over, it's been a great way to display more information and build our network further. The website is being developed after huge deliberations on fonts, images and the best way show this and that. I had no idea the choices were so endless and finally we have a template! With a sigh of relief I have now handed it over to the web designer! It is with excitement and a healthy dose of trepidation that we finish the fabric designs. I was working to a brief of fresh, yet nostalgic prints that embody our ethos. Prints for a family home, be it town or country, that give off a feel of summer's past at the seaside, of warm, sunny (definitely a past reference!) July afternoons, of crawling up the rocks in sandals and buckets of tepid seawater and the afternoon's catch slopping against sun burnt legs.
It was important to me that the designs came from my own drawings. Similarly we wanted to find a printer who would be able to be replicate these and print them on a rotary flat -bed for screen printing or similar. We could have done digital printing, but we wanted these to be durable and multi-purpose fabrics, with a sense of the hand-made about them. I am going to use them for upholstering an armchair, for Roman Blinds and Nursery curtains, all with matching cushions of course! I hope there will be something there for everyone!
The blog has also been instrumental in us building a supportive network. We are introducing guest bloggers for their insight and creating a community, where it is more about sharing ideas. We are hoping to bring a wide variety of baking tips, recipes, specialist gardening advice as well as the general mayhem of our Duck Egg journey. Along with that the Book Club is going well and we launched a Facebook site last month and every month we will post a new book to read. It was something I really wanted to do as a Mummy I felt it was hard to attend a book club, but it's a great way to share ideas and perhaps suggest new books to each other whilst still in the glory of my hoodie and painting jeans!
And so, my worst habit is that last on my list is my new found talent for Excel spreadsheets. I have stubbornly ignored this phenomena all my life, yet one dark evening I did indeed find a 'Sum' button and yes it did work, despite my protestations that 'Sum' is totally different on a Mac and why didn't Hubby know that?...It is the same and the same totals still apply...! It is all neatly and conveniently working everything out for me, no longer streams of numbers stretching into infinity...No longer desperate checks of the Daily Mail Online or anything to pretend that I might be working rather than doing calculations. However, I am now at one with Excel and finding a strange pleasure in it and keeping creativity where it belongs!
Duck Egg key addresses:
www.facebook.com/duckeggdesigns
www.duckeggdesigns.com
Tweet us at @duck_egg
