I’ve mentioned that recently my partner, two daughters and I temporarily moved to Spain to spend some much-needed time with my partner’s family.

We have a lovely life in Sydney, but with no help with our children (except for the childcare we pay for), it often feels like there is little room for anything but survival. There is an endless to-do list and the days feel jam-packed with the daily chores required to keep a family of four afloat. My partner and I fall into bed each night relieved that we’ve somehow survived another day.

Here in Spain, things are very different.

The pressure valve has been released and we suddenly have room in our days. Extra sets of hands to pass our baby to. Another adult around to make our daughter breakfast or wipe her bum when she yells out. It’s still summer holidays for our niece and nephews, so everything feels relaxed and easy.

Interestingly, for a moment I thought that was all I needed to suddenly feel creative.

I thought I’d pull my embroidery out of my suitcase or ask my mother-in-law if I could jump on her sewing machine. I imagined that once the pressure was gone, creativity would simply rush in to fill the space. But although I feel calmer and more relaxed than I have in a long time, I don’t particularly feel inspired.

I was thinking about this on my morning walk and remembered that this is exactly what these Making, Again experiments are about. I had been using them as a way to get my stressed, tired and overwhelmed self back to making, but I’ve realised you don’t need to be on that end of the spectrum to find this approach helpful.

Here I am, finally feeling relaxed and at ease, and I still feel the need to find my way towards making through a different path. Rather than asking, What should I make next? I’m asking:

What are the things I need to do to feel creative?

What helps me become open to ideas?

I think it can be easy to assume the first step is scrolling Instagram and looking at new patterns, sifting through your fabric stash or even sitting down at your sewing machine and hoping inspiration will strike. But what comes before that?

What are the little practices or rituals that help us become receptive to inspiration?

It makes me think of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, one of the many books I devoured in my late twenties when I had an insatiable hunger for anything about creativity and small business. Gilbert describes ideas as having a life of their own, floating around looking for a human willing to grab hold of them and bring them into the world.

Whether or not you believe ideas literally work that way, I like the question it leaves me with: What do I need to do to be open to ideas?

I know everyone will answer this differently. Some people might not know the answer at all. If you don’t, I wonder if this could be something to explore during our current Making, Again experiment.

Rather than gathering only colours, textures, images and objects, perhaps we can also gather information about ourselves. We can notice what makes us curious, what wakes us up, what makes us want to look closer or what gives an idea somewhere to land.

These are the things we can return to whether we are stressed and overwhelmed or, as I am now, suddenly relaxed with a little more room to breathe.

As I settle into a new routine in a new country, I’m reminding myself of the things that make me feel interested, curious and open to ideas. Rather than convincing myself that I need to be more disciplined, or forcing myself to sit down and stitch, I’m going to put my energy into my creative rituals for the next week.

Here’s what that looks like for me.

Starting the day with a walk

It’s very hot in the south of Spain at the moment, which means the majority of the day is spent indoors waiting for it to cool down. I notice how much more engaged and energetic I feel on the days when I get out the door with the pram for a walk while it’s still cool enough.

It gives my brain a chance to wander and gives me time to take in all the new and interesting things around me.

Journaling

This is something I’ve never managed to turn into an ongoing routine, but I know how much it helps when I fall into a rhythm with it. I’d like to spend some time each day journaling, without feeling like I need to come to any particular conclusion.

Some questions I’m going to start with:

• What has caught my attention lately?

• What do I want to know more about, for no particularly useful reason?

• What have I been wanting to try?

• What would I try if I knew I was going to throw it away afterwards?

• What am I consuming that leaves very little room for my own thoughts?

• What would happen if I stopped trying to turn every idea into a project?

• What am I drawn towards right now, even if I can’t explain why?

• What would I like to make a little more room for?

Turning away from the habits that aren’t helping

When we travelled from Sydney to Madrid, via China, we didn’t have internet access. During the 48 hours it took us to get here (we spent a night in a hotel to break up the trip), my one and only job was to make the journey as comfortable for our girls as possible.

I realised how much easier it was to be present without my phone.

When we got to Spain and I was connected again, I found myself feeling almost repulsed by it.

I have the advantage that I don’t really need to contact people while I’m here and my partner, as the Spanish speaker with family here, does most of the organising and planning. So I’ve leaned into it. I leave my phone on Do Not Disturb for hours during the day. I leave it in my handbag instead of my pocket. I leave it in one part of the house while I’m in another.

For months I’ve been thinking about how I could curb my phone habit, and then, almost without effort, my relationship with it changed.

I’m interested to see what might grow in the space it leaves behind.

Saying yes to creative conversations

Last week, my lovely friend Alys from Unpicked Studio reached out to ask if I’d like to jump on a call. We are finally almost in the same time zone.

I considered pushing it back because my brain felt like mashed potatoes after the long trip with the kids, but I also knew it would be good for me to talk to her, even if I felt like I didn’t have anything interesting to say. And it was. Our conversation planted some little seeds that have been slowly growing ever since.

Looking over this list, I realise that very little of it looks like what we traditionally think of as being creative. There’s no finished garment. No sketchbook filled with beautiful sketches or a Pinterest board for a capsule wardrobe. I may not even pick up my embroidery anytime soon. But maybe these things aren’t separate from my creative practice. Maybe they are my creative practice.

Walking. Noticing. Writing. Making space for my own thoughts. Talking to people who make me curious. Leaving enough empty space for something unexpected to arrive. These are things I can return to whether I feel creative or not.

And maybe that’s what I mean when I talk about creative rituals. Not habits designed to make us produce more, but small practices that help us stay connected to the curious, interested, playful parts of ourselves. Things that give those little creative seeds somewhere to land. What does that for you?

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Sitting down at a laptop to work and not having anything to do is quite a daunting place to be. This is something I planned for and is a situation I put in motion many months ago when I realised I was pregnant with our second child, but of course I could never have imagined what it would actually feel like to not have a next project to jump to or an urgent email to reply to.

All I knew at the time was enough was enough. I could no longer live on the never-ending hamster wheel I had created for myself. And even if there was a way for me to muster the stamina to keep going, with a baby on the way, I needed to set up my business so I could comfortably take some time off.

I wound up Curated, our monthly project subscription, and launched Making, Again, an offering much more aligned with my capacity and current interests. It is so much smaller than Curated ever was, in the amount of content I produce, the time it takes to create it and even the size of the community who has decided to be a part of it. That bit has been a difficult adjustment in some ways, although really, I had no choice.

Things remained busy as we wrapped up Curated at the end of December 2025, launched Making, Again in January 2026 and then my baby was born in February. She needed to come into the world three weeks early, giving me no time to actually finish up my work before maternity leave. I went from madly trying to finish everything I needed to do before the baby came (which I didn’t manage to do) to welcoming our newest sweet girl in a matter of days.

The weeks after her birth felt overwhelmingly busy, and it isn’t until now that I have fully realised the magnitude of where I’m at.

I am starting again. I have chosen to start again.

But I also know that where I am starting from is not the floor. I am very lucky to have already earned a huge amount of trust within our community. People know that I know what I am doing. I have a good track record and a following (if that counts for anything these days…)

When I felt like I was starting to come up for air and was finding my way out of the newborn bubble, I managed to schedule a few conversations with other people running businesses aligned with mine. In one of those conversations, I was told not to discount what I have already built. This was a good reminder. Even if I am “starting again”, I am not really starting again. I am not starting from scratch. I have the systems, the contacts, the knowledge, the community. Many business owners would love to start from this place, and I sure don’t take that for granted.

A few months ago, I was invited to have a conversation about the possibility of passing on my business. For a minute, I thought this might be the out I had been looking for. The way to rip off the bandaid and get out of this uncomfortable limbo-land I have been living in for the last couple of years. Isn’t this what I wanted? A “get out of jail free card” of sorts?

But then I started thinking about the practicalities and the offer, and I suddenly became quite protective of this little business I have poured my heart and soul into over the last 11 years. If I gave it away, what would I have to show for this period? What legacy am I leaving? What is this business without me? A business I accidentally created around my face, my skills, my voice and my personality.

It opened up many conversations that I had put off having, made me face up to some hard truths and some uncomfortable realities. I mentioned to someone that my business suddenly felt very small, and she said, “Your business has been small for a while, you just weren’t ready to accept it until now.”

And that’s true. It’s a bit of a hard pill to swallow, going from a business that is pumping out weekly content, monthly projects and supporting a small little team, to just me, staring at a blank page and wondering what’s next.

And there are other things I have had to face up to as well. My business is a bit of a mess. I am sure anyone who has been in business for a while will understand this, but parts of it are just hanging on by a thread. Platforms pieced together in a way that worked well at one point, but 11 years on don’t feel like the best solution. Turning back some of those choices now feels almost impossible.

I am in tax debt that I allowed to creep up while running Curated. We were finally making more money than we ever had before, but the cost of all the contractors required to keep it running crept up too. Every dollar that came in seemed to go out just as quickly. I thought we were at least breaking even, but I realise now that often we weren’t.

These are hard things to face because I have put so much time and energy into this business. I had hoped that by 11 years in I would be cruising. That I would feel financially stable and sure of the future.

Instead, I have never felt so unsure of the future. I had imagined that I would have more to show for the time and effort I’ve put in by now.

It occurred to me recently that I have been on a treadmill for as long as I can remember. Long before I even started In the Folds.

I grew up in a very loving family, but it wasn’t always an easy household to grow up in. Things were often very dysfunctional. There are parts of that story that aren’t mine alone to tell, and I don’t feel the need to go into them here. But through years of therapy, I have learned and understood the long reach those early experiences can have.

I learned very young how to keep going. How to be useful. How to notice what needed doing and do it. How to hold things together when things around me felt uncertain. I think somewhere along the way, being busy and capable became a way of feeling safe.

And then I built a business where those qualities were incredibly useful. For a long time, I probably thought of my ability to keep all the plates spinning as one of my greatest strengths. And in many ways it has been. It allowed me to build something from nothing, to teach myself what I needed to know, to weather difficult periods and keep showing up. But I’m starting to wonder about the cost of always being the person who can keep going. Things kept happening, or I kept choosing them, and I had no choice but to keep running. To keep all the plates in the air and to keep showing up.

With the birth of my second child, I was forced to slow down in a way that I didn’t allow myself to do when I had my first. When my first daughter was born, I just kept going. Motherhood became another thing to learn and master. The survival mode I had already been living in continued, only harder. It felt like I had gone up five levels without any warning and I had to clench my fists and keep on keeping on.

This time has been different. There simply hasn’t been enough of me to go around. I haven’t been able to work harder or get more organised or push through until things settle down. I’ve had to accept that some things need to change.

I have surrendered to it.

And although that has been deeply uncomfortable, I think I needed to reach a point where my usual coping strategies stopped working. I had to question not just how I was going to keep doing everything, but whether I wanted to keep doing everything in the first place.

For the first time, the question hasn’t been how do I make all of this work? To what do I want my life to look like?

Since starting this Substack I have written a lot about the lows of running a small business. I would love to say the highs and lows, but really, this place was born out of a need to talk about the hard bits and the messy middle. I’ve also written a lot about the identity shift of becoming a mother, and increasingly, those two things have felt impossible to separate. It has all become a tangled mess of needs and wants as I’ve tried to adjust my expectations and plans around this new chapter of life.

Having my second has confirmed that the way things were going before no longer fits. But before throwing it all out, I have started to wonder how I can adjust things in a way that they do fit.

It’s impossible not to draw a comparison between what I have been doing for all these years, helping other people make fitting adjustments to patterns so they fit, and what I am doing now. Sitting back and working out what adjustments I need to make to make this business, and perhaps my life more broadly, fit me for the next decade.

And although there is a lot of discomfort in being in this in-between time, I also feel incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to figure out what comes next.

When it dawned on me that I hadn’t stopped to properly reflect for as long as I can remember, that I had been living a life of putting out fires, I saw a small light. This came after the shock and the tears and spending a bit of time coming to terms with it.

My partner and I had already decided that we’d be moving our little family from Sydney to a city in the south of Spain for a few months to spend some time with his family. Suddenly, the timing of it felt significant.

He has parental leave for most of it, so isn’t working much. We are staying with his mother, so finally have the extra set of hands we have been yearning for in Sydney. Our daughters have aunties, uncles and cousins desperate to spend time with them.

I suddenly have alone time.

And now here I am, sitting at my laptop with nothing particularly urgent to do. My first instinct, of course, is to fill this time with things that make me feel like I’m being “productive”. To make a plan. Start a project. Fix the business. Decide what comes next.

But I’m starting to think the better use of this time might be to resist doing that. To use it as an experiment. A time to play and figure things out. A time to allow myself to be bored and see what fills the gaps. A time to get to know myself as I am now, rather than immediately building another treadmill for myself to run on.

A time to work out what still fits, what needs adjusting and what I might finally be ready to let go of. I have no idea what I’ll have to show for it at the end. Maybe, for once, that’s the point.

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For most of my creative life, I’ve thought about creativity in terms of output. What am I making? What am I working on? What will this idea become?

I’m normally on the lookout for references or inspiration because I’m designing a new sewing pattern. I might save an image because I’ll use it for something or I research because I have a question I’m trying to answer.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the other side of a creative practice. Not what we put out into the world, but what we let in.

The images we look at, the things we read, the places we go, the conversations we have, the colours we notice or the details that make us look twice.

It’s so easy to get stuck in our usual routines or ways of doing things and forget that we can leave some room to follow ideas simply because we are curious.

That’s where our next Making, Again experiment begins.

Making, Again is an ongoing series of gentle creative experiments for paid subscribers. Every six weeks, you’ll be invited into a new experiment. Each one is designed to help you notice, reflect and make in small, achievable ways, without the pressure to produce something “finished” or impressive.

You can think of these experiments as touchpoints rather than tasks. A chance to pause, pay attention, and reconnect with your making practice as it is right now. We’ll take it together, one experiment at a time.

Experiment 6: Gathering

For the next six weeks, rather than asking ourselves what we should make, we’re going to spend some time paying attention to what we feel drawn to. We’ll gather colours, textures, shapes, words, photographs, scraps, conversations, questions and ideas. Some of it might eventually find its way into something we make. Some of it (or even most of it) might not. That’s part of the experiment.

Gathering isn’t research for our next project. We don’t need to justify what we collect by finding a use for it later. Instead, we’re practising following our attention without immediately asking where it’s leading. If something makes you look twice, that’s enough reason to gather it.

The input side of creativity

We tend to give a lot of attention to the output of our creative practice. The finished garment or the completed drawing. The essay or the thing we can photograph, share or hold in our hands.

Input is harder to see, but probably just as important. It might look like wandering through an second-hand shop and leaving empty-handed. Taking the long way home because you have twenty minutes to spare. Reading about a sewing technique you are interested in but may never try. Noticing an interesting colour combination from the train window. Starting a conversation in the queue for coffee. Watching what your child stops to examine on the ground. None of these things necessarily produce anything. But ideas need somewhere to come from.

We need encounters with things we wouldn’t have thought to search for. We need opportunities to be surprised, to change our minds and to become interested in things we didn’t know we were interested in.

This feels particularly important in a world shaped so heavily by routine and algorithms. If we want to see something different, sometimes we need to intentionally step outside our usual. We need to take the time to look up.

What you’ll find in the Playbook for this Experiment

I’ve put together a PDF Playbook to help you explore Gathering in your own way.

Inside you’ll find:

• Before we gather: a chance to reflect on where your inspiration currently comes from and how you tend to engage with it

• Make somewhere to gather: a simple invitation to create a place for the things that catch your attention over the next six weeks

• Start with what you already have: a short activity to begin gathering from your existing environment before looking further afield

• Ways to gather: prompts to help you collect colours, textures, words, shapes, ideas, conversations and other fragments from everyday life

• Making Experiments: six low-pressure invitations to respond to what you’ve gathered through small acts of making and play

• Reflection: questions to help you notice what changed, what surprised you and what you might like to keep gathering after the experiment ends

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“Enough” has been my favourite experiment so far.

It may be because it’s been the first one to get me making after maternity leave, or it might be because it not only shifted how I was thinking about my relationship to making, but also infiltrated so many other parts of my life.

What excited me about the Making, Again series when I started it was the idea of it being an experiment for our community, as well as for me as a maker and business owner.

What this experiment has done for me, though, is made me stop thinking in these independent buckets: the maker, the business owner, the mother, the friend, the person. It’s made me realise how interconnected these things are, and the knock-on effect that tending to one area can have on the others.

For example, I thought lowering my standards around what making meant in this season was just about my creative life. But the more I followed the “enough” approach, the more it started showing up in my day-to-day life.

Accepting that I’d done enough in a given day and leaving the laundry piled up without being folded before bed. Listening to my body when it said it was tired. Using kind words with myself when I felt snappy towards my preschooler, and using the tools I have to get us both out of the funk.

What I realised was that “enough” creates room around things. It gives room to breathe and allows space to exhale.

Making doesn’t need to be a finished object. It can just be a line of stitches and the calming feeling of needle in cloth. Finding the rhythm of the stitches without a plan in mind.

My business doesn’t need an immediate plan for what comes next. I don’t need to know exactly what it will look like in six months or how I will make everything work. I can give myself some room to wonder about it, to notice what I’m interested in, to try things and to change my mind.

What this experiment has allowed me to do is loosen my grip and make room for the unexpected. For curiosity, trial and error and play.

I’m realising now that this space between where I am and where I want to be is actually the fun part. Not something I need to rush through, but something I can savour and enjoy.

I’d love to know how you’ve moved through this experiment, and whether you found the themes showing up in other areas of your life too.

Before we finish up…

Take a moment to look back over the past few weeks. You don’t need to have completed anything, or even feel like you properly participated. Just notice what comes up.

• What did Enough make possible for you?
  Did anything become easier once you lowered the bar or let go of how you thought it should look?

• What counted that you might not have counted before?
  A few stitches, some thinking, pulling out an old project, resting, deciding not to make something at all?

• Where did you notice yourself wanting more?
  More time, more materials, more energy, more progress. Did you ever discover that what you had was enough to begin?

• Was there anything you gave yourself permission to let go of?
  An unfinished project, an expectation, a plan, a deadline, or simply the feeling that you should be doing more?

• What would you like to carry forward?
  Is there one small idea, practice or permission from Enough that you’d like to keep with you after the experiment ends?

A little note on timings (and practicing enough): As I was writing this, I realised I’d miscounted. I thought this was the final essay of our six-week Enough experiment, but it turns out it’s only week five. For a moment, I started scrambling for something else to write this week so I could hold this post back for next week. Then I looked at what life is asking of me right now and realised that perhaps this is where I get to practise what I’ve spent the past few weeks writing about. So I’m going to let this be enough. Five weeks of writing about Enough, and one final week of actually practising it.

My three-and-a-half-year-old is officially in her artist era. I got home the other day and she popped her head around the corner from her painting set up and said “my an artist” with the biggest smile on her face. Any free moment she has is filled with paper and markers. What I’ve noticed recently is that she rarely sits down to draw knowing exactly what she wants to create. She just picks up a marker, puts it on the page and sees where it takes her. She doesn’t have a plan and the joy is in the process and what emerges.

Watching her has made me realise that this used to be my default way of making too.

When I made clothes when I was younger, my process was very different to what it is now. I’d normally have an occasion I wanted to sew for, usually a party or event, and I’d rummage through my pile of fabric or head to a local fabric shop, buy something without much thought and just get to work. I’d never even heard the word toile. I didn’t feel confident enough to use patterns at that point and I didn’t mind. My body was fairly flat in all directions which made it not so difficult to make clothes for.

I’d wrap the fabric around my body in front of a mirror, or around my mannequin, and use a range of cuts, pins and folds to create something interesting. I’d sew it together, likely using the first technique that came to mind, and wear it out that night, even if that meant it was unhemmed or held together with a safety pin or two.

Twenty or so years and a degree in Fashion and Textiles later, my approach has changed drastically. Now I think about what I want to make, find the closest pattern in my stash, print it, alter it, make a toile and check it. Make more changes and then potentially make another toile or two. By the time I get to sew the real thing, I have a fairly good idea of what the outcome will be.

All this planning and preparation means that I can relax and enjoy the process without too many surprises, but it also takes away the possibility of happy accidents and unexpected discoveries.

At the moment I’m working on a little appliqué project. I found a reusable shopping bag we had at home. I picked out a range of fabric from my stash. I made a pattern for the pieces, but didn’t think about what fabric I’d use for each piece until I started cutting. I attached the fabric for the vase to the bag to get started, rather than doing it all at once.

One day I found myself with a sleeping baby on me and some time to stitch. I’d already used blanket stitch to attach the piece, so didn’t have much else to do, so I started filling in the squares of colour on the printed fabric with thread instead. A happy surprise that I hadn’t planned, but why not? I wanted to stitch and that got me stitching.

I then fused the petals of one of the flowers to the bag, playing with different combinations of colour and scale as I went. I stitched around them with colours my daughter chose.

During the next session I started stitching the flower stem. I didn’t like the technique I chose and, instead of just soldiering on because I was in a rush, for a change, I wasn’t. I don’t have a deadline, a time or an event this needs to be completed by, so I removed the stitches and did a bit of searching online for a different technique. I found something that would work better and went for it, filling in the colour one line at a time.

What this project is teaching me is to find the fun in surprises again. To use my creativity and problem solving throughout the project, not just at the beginning. It allows me to mess up, make mistakes and then choose another path. It feels exciting and playful.

I thought choosing a project like this was simply about taking away the hurdles. Choosing something that I didn’t have to leave my baby to work on. Choosing a project that didn’t need to fit around a fluctuating postpartum and breastfeeding body. Choosing a project made from things I already had. But it hasn’t just been about removing hurdles. It has added something too. Spontaneity. The freedom to let things take shape as I go, instead of needing to know exactly what the finished piece will look like before I begin. I still don’t know what it’s going to look like when I finish… or even where the finish line is and that excites me.

I’ve realised that this project has been good for my nervous system. It has removed the stress from making. The stakes feel pretty low when you’re working on a calico bag made out of tiny fabric scraps and embroidery thread I’ve been hoarding for years. I’m not even having to have time away from my children to make it happen.

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Normally I write about our Making, Again experiments on a Friday and about something else on a Tuesday, whether that’s motherhood or small business, or whatever else I’m thinking about or noticing that week.

But this week, as I started writing today’s essay, I realised that the different parts of my life, and this little Substack, have started overlapping. I couldn’t workout if I was writing about a making experiment or life in general.

If you’re new here, a Making, Again experiment is an invitation to explore one small idea through your own creative practice. Rather than focusing on finishing projects or following a set of rules, each experiment offers a theme, prompts and simple invitations to help you notice what happens when you approach making in a different way. I hope to encourage you to become more curious about your relationship with making, one small experiment at a time.

When we started our current Making, Again experiment, Enough, I thought it was mostly about making. It seemed like the natural next step in our range of experiments. Enough fabric, time, energy and finished projects. Enough of the impossibly high expectations we put on ourselves when it comes to making. I was feeling particularly stretched for time when I was working on the playbook and it felt like an early test in accepting that sometimes enough is just that. Enough.

For me personally, I thought this experiment was about accepting that I have enough fabric, thread and tools in my garage studio. That I don’t need another pattern, or an uninterrupted afternoon stretching before me, to just get started. That I have enough skills for now. That ten hand stitches on a calico shopping bag while my baby sleeps on me counts.

Those things are still true, but over the past few weeks I’ve realised that “enough” has infiltrated more deeply than my making practice. It’s been teaching me about self compassion.

Last week I was out and about with my two little ones. I received a text message that instantly sent me spiralling and overwhelmed my nervous system. We were at a local playgroup and my eldest wanted me to dance with her while my youngest needed a feed. Of course I could barely do either because I was feeling so overwhelmed. I felt myself becoming snappy with my eldest, even though she hadn’t done anything wrong. To her, my mood had just shifted for no reason and she didn’t know what had happened. I barely knew what had happened.

For so many years I have responded to moments like this by becoming my own harshest critic. Asking myself why I couldn’t handle it better. Why I looked at my phone instead of being completely present with my two children. Why I couldn’t regulate faster and be more patient. Why I couldn’t let it wash over me like it seemed to for the other mums.

We were leaving playgroup, the little one in the pram and the big one skipping along beside us, and I decided to stop my spiralling thoughts in their tracks.

I reminded myself that I’m enough. Even when I’m overwhelmed or snappy, or not the best version of myself. I’m still enough. I took some long slow breaths and found it in me to try something different. To stop those negative thoughts before they took over.

How could I regulate both myself and my daughter in this moment so we could have a fresh start to the afternoon, rather than beginning it on the wrong foot?

As we walked along the footpath on the busy main street, we tried something I’d never done with my daughter before. I asked her to notice what she could feel. Could she feel the warm sun on her face like I could? Could she feel the pavement under our feet? What could she hear? The bus as it roared past us? Could she hear the birds chirping quietly in the background if she tuned out the traffic?

We walked into a café and bought her a gingerbread cookie. We smelt her gingerbread biscuit before she took her first bite. We let the baby smell it too.

I felt myself exhale, realising that I had turned our afternoon in a different direction. Nothing drastic had changed, but for a few minutes I stepped out of fight or flight and back into the present.

Although I started this experiment hoping that it would help me find a way to get needle and thread through fabric (it did), it has also made me realise that this experiment is so much bigger than that. It’s about questioning the stories we keep telling ourselves when we’re in the middle of them. It’s about accepting the situation or resources we have, but not following the usual script that assumes we need more of something, whether that is fabric, time or, in this case, patience.

Last night it got to 9pm and somehow both our children were asleep. We have two little night owls, so they’re often up quite late. I was exhausted, but I was already planning to stay up and fold the overflowing basket of washing. I still needed to wash the dinner dishes. Maybe I could take advantage of this extra time and reply to a few emails.

But then I wondered if I could flip the script and try something new like I did when we left playgroup. Could I practise some self compassion and just go to bed? Could I look back on the day and see all that I had done to keep two little people alive and fed and comforted and entertained, and see that that is enough?

I told myself that I’ve done more than enough. My body is allowed to rest. I don’t need to optimise every minute of the day.

I’ve been surprised to realise that this might be the real work of this experiment for me. Right in this moment, when I need the reminder most, that I’m enough. That I’m doing enough. And maybe over time, to actually believe it.

It’s been interesting to realise how many different ways I can practise enough, and to see how these experiments around making can weave in and out of so many aspects of my life.

Every time I choose ten stitches instead of waiting for a long stretch of time, I’m practising enough.

Every time I stop before I’m finished because the baby wakes up, I’m practising enough.

Every time I choose rest over squeezing one more thing into the day, I’m practising enough.

For the first time in a long time, I’m practising tuning into my body and asking what is enough in this particular moment? That is a question I keep reminding myself to come back to. Because often times we have already done enough.

I'd love to know: where in your life could you practise enough this week?

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Last week I wrote about how I found a way to start making again since the birth of my second child by bringing the goal posts closer and choosing a project that is more aligned with what my life actually looks like these days.

In the week since, my project has continued and I’ve found little pockets of time to stitch. It becomes easier with each stitch. Momentum is building.

Interestingly, nothing about my circumstances has changed. My baby still needs me. My days are still fragmented. The only thing that changed was my expectation of what counted. Once I stopped expecting hours of uninterrupted sewing, it became much easier to begin. And once I began, I wanted to keep going.

What this experiment has reminded me is that there can be a middle ground. I tend to have an “all or nothing“ approach in a lot of areas in my life and I constantly need to remind myself that there is another option. Having a relationship with making doesn’t need to mean making an entire outfit, but it also doesn’t mean I have to drop it until I have more time.

The middle ground often doesn’t look very impressive from the outside. It looks like ten stitches. It looks like mending instead of making. It looks like choosing a project that fits your life instead of waiting for life to fit your project. But over time, those small moments build a relationship with creativity that can survive even the busiest seasons.

In today’s post, I wanted to encourage you to tune into that grey area. You might be in a similar season to me, feeling like every waking moment is dedicated to little people. Or you might be struggling with health issues, caring for someone else, working too much or simply feeling disconnected from your creativity.

So many of us spend our time living at the extremes. We’re either making constantly or not at all. We’re either productive or we’re failing.

But what if there was another option? What if you could find your equivalent of the appliqué project that has got me slowly stitching again?

It probably won’t look like mine. And that’s the point. Enough isn’t something we all arrive at in the same way. It’s something each of us defines for ourselves, based on the season we’re in.

I encourage you to spend a few quiet minutes with the questions below. Write your answers in a journal if you’d like or simply sit with them and notice what comes up.

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When I was pregnant with my first baby, I spent a lot of time thinking about and researching all the things we would need. A friend passed on a categorised spreadsheet and I worked my way through it, item by item, picking up what I could second hand, investing in some things ourselves and adding the rest to a wish list for friends and family.

My partner painted a chest of second hand drawers. I categorised the tiny little clothes, burp cloths and sleeping bags. Although most of the things we purchased or were given were very useful (except for the tiny baby mittens that we never once used and the nose picker someone told me I’d need), what I later realised was that no product was going to make the explosion into motherhood any less traumatic.

A high school friend who I hadn’t seen much of in my twenties became pregnant three months before me. We restarted our friendship over the shared experience of pregnancy. Having her three months ahead of me through every part of pregnancy, birth and new motherhood turned out to be the best gift I was given. When I woke up the day after giving birth to my baby and realised I hadn’t read a single thing about taking care of a newborn, she recommended a book. I downloaded it to my Kindle and finished it in two days. When our baby was struggling with gas, she sent me videos with techniques that had helped her bub. When my baby’s sleep went to crap, she was there. Giving gentle suggestions of things I could try, but also just offering support and compassion. She was someone I could text in the wee hours of the morning when I was up feeding for what felt like the hundredth time (it probably was). No question was too big, too small or too silly.

When I joined a new parents’ group, mornings in the park became my weekly salvation. A group of mums in the same boat as me. Awkwardly learning to breastfeed while sitting cross legged in the park, madly walking or rocking our babies to sleep when they emerged from the sleepy newborn phase. A group chat where we could share all our questions and doubts. A safe place to say, “This is hard.” “I don’t know if I’m doing this right.” On rough afternoons when I’d not managed to take a shower and the baby just needed everything I had, I’d have a friend to walk with, drink tea with or sit in the park with.

Just over three years later, I’ve had my second daughter. This time I feel a lot more confident in what I’m doing. It’s felt less like an explosion and more like a planned crashed landing. There is less Googling and more trust in the process. I have more friends with babies and young kids. I have community around me. Friends to call, text, empathise with and complain to.

A close friend from university just had her first baby, and although I made her a care package of tasty snacks to grab during night feeds, a night light and some books to start the baby’s library, I knew that the best thing I could do for her was just be there. To be that friend I had who was three months ahead of me that I could lean on. To offer advice when asked, to offer compassion when those early days feel impossibly hard and to research the new concepts that have become part of her early motherhood that weren’t part of mine. To lend her my brain when hers still feels foggy and too slow.

And what hasn’t been a surprise, but has been exactly what I needed, is that we’ve become closer. Because that’s what vulnerability does. It brings us closer together.

I’ve been thinking about all of this lately because I saw a post in a mums’ group that shocked me. It asked how many people were using AI for parenting advice. So many people answered to say they were. This wasn’t something people were doing when I had my first baby, which shows how quickly AI has become the norm. And because I’m feeling much more confident this time around, there has been less Googling. It didn’t even occur to me to ask AI for advice. And I’m not judging people who do. I find it incredibly helpful for lots of everyday tasks.

I’m sure ChatGPT can give great advice about nap schedules and starting solids. But can it really stand beside you and say, “I know how you feel. This is hard. You will survive”? And if it did, would you believe it? Knowing that it’s a robot that has never held a little being that it grew in its own body, looked down in awe when the baby was put on their chest and just sobbed with relief that birth was over and the baby was here. A bot that has never been tired to the core, struggling with breastfeeding or suddenly felt like a stranger in your relationship.

What I’ve learned from being both the giver and the receiver of this support is that both experiences bring you closer to another human. When our babies became toddlers, I told my longtime friend, who I no longer needed to text ten times a day, that I couldn’t have done it without her. We both cried with love and relief for the time we had gotten through together. A few weeks after my university friend had her baby, she said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you as much as I could have been. I didn’t realise how hard it was.” And once again I cried and felt closer to another human.

I know it’s hard to be vulnerable. To say, “This is hard.” “I don’t know what I’m doing.” “I feel like I’m failing.” “I’m not sure if I like this.” “I’m not sure I was supposed to be a mum.” But what are we missing out on by asking AI these questions instead of other people?

True vulnerability invites connection. Sometimes simply saying the hard thing gives someone else permission to say it too.

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In a previous essay I wrote about my desire to take my eldest daughter’s drawings and embroider them onto fabric. Nice idea, right? In theory it was and, for a moment there, it seemed completely doable (I even called the essay “The softest possible first step”). I had the fabric. I had the needle and thread. I had more than enough drawings to choose from.

But then I got stuck on the best way to transfer the drawings onto the fabric. I asked in our community group for some advice, but even figuring out which route to take felt too much. It seems like such a small challenge, but when you have a preschooler and a small baby, any challenge can become a big one. I needed time to experiment and figure out the best option, and that’s something I don’t have much of at the moment.

For our new experiment, we’re thinking about enoughness. What if the skills I have, the fabric I have, the notions I have and even the ideas I have are enough?

With this change in perspective, I realised the goal post I’d set for the previous experiment was still too far away. At least for now that goal post is too far away (this is where I gently remind myself that capacity is elastic. Just because I can’t do something now doesn’t mean it will always be this way).

I thought moving the goal post from drafting a pattern and making a garment to simply using a pattern I already owned with fabric I already had would be enough. But even that felt impossible. So I moved it again, to embroidering Lyra’s drawings onto fabric. And yet somehow that was still too far away.

For this experiment, I decided to appliqué a design onto a calico shopping bag. A shopping bag I already had. With fabric, thread and fusible interfacing that I already had.

And do you know what?

I’ve already started.

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I’m currently on maternity leave and although I’m working as little as possible, my brain has started wondering what happens next year.

This year is about adjusting to becoming a family of four. It’s about nurturing our newest little love and finally taking a long overdue trip to Spain so we can spend time with my partner’s family and they can delight in our children. But next year, Shorter Daughter (thank you, Bluey, for this nickname I’ve borrowed) will be in daycare and I’ll need to work out what comes next.

If you’ve been following along on this Substack for a while, you’ll know I’m in a bit of a state of flux when it comes to In the Folds (the business that I founded over ten years ago, making sewing patterns for home sewists).

At the end of last year I closed Curated, our monthly project subscription, and replaced it with Making, Again, which feels like a much gentler offering for both me and our community. I’ve also spoken about the cost of producing PDF sewing patterns and the fact that I’m not sure when I’ll release another one. Right now I’m really content with the breadth of our catalogue. It feels complete in a way it never has before.

While I’ve been on maternity leave, I’ve also been questioning whether I want to be in business at all.

Running a business while you’re on maternity leave is an uncomfortable place to be. Thankfully, in Australia we are entitled to paid parental leave from the government, so I’ve been able to take some time off without worrying too much about the financial side of things. But there’s always something hanging over my head. An essay to write, a process I could streamline, a customer question to answer, a new product idea. Of course there is very little time or energy to work on any of it.

Thankfully I’m much more at ease with that discomfort this time because it’s exactly how I felt after my first daughter was born. So this time, I do know that it’s normal and also temporary.

With my first baby, I remember the constant guilt of never getting enough work done because I had a baby to care for. At the same time I felt envious of friends who could be completely present during their maternity leave because they weren’t running a business in the background. All I could think was that I wanted to be employed, just like them.

Then something changed.

Around six months postpartum, one by one, those same friends started returning to work. Their babies went to daycare and I realised self-employment wasn’t so bad after all. Even when I went back to work, I only needed a few days of childcare each week and still had plenty of time with my babe. The flexibility I’d been longing to escape suddenly became the thing I was most grateful for.

Unfortunately I don’t have the same flexibility this time. There are two little people now and we live in Sydney, where the cost of living doesn’t leave much room for romanticising flexible work. We’re in a larger, more expensive house than when we had one child, and before long we’ll be paying for childcare for two.

Part of me has been wondering whether I want to stay in business at all, or at least in the same way I have for the last decade. Never quite knowing how much money will come in each month is exhausting. The thought of a regular pay cheque feels more and more appealing. So does not being responsible for every single decision.

But then I ask myself what I would actually do if In the Folds became a side project rather than my full-time work?

I often feel like I’ve backed myself into the tiniest niche on the internet and that getting hired to do anything other than the exact thing I do now would be impossible.

I’m a patternmaker, but over the last decade I’ve specialised in creating sewing patterns for home sewists, which is quite different from patternmaking in the traditional fashion industry.

I remember doing some casual cutting work in a Sydney studio years ago, not long after I’d started In the Folds. One of the patternmakers asked me how many patterns I was producing each week.

Each week.

At that point I was making two or three a year.

Although I became much faster over time, I realised we weren’t actually doing the same job.

When you’re making patterns for a fashion label, the pattern is simply a tool used to produce a garment. When you’re making patterns for home sewists, the pattern is the product. Every line needs to be carefully graded across multiple sizes. Every notch, label and marking matters. Then there are pages and pages of instructions, illustrations, testing, editing, layout and formatting. The garment almost becomes secondary. What you’re really making is an experience that allows someone else to successfully make the garment themselves.

That patternmaker was producing multiple patterns every week. It still took me months to create one pattern ready for release.

I’ve been thinking about this lately while pushing the pram around as my baby naps. And what has occurred to me is that maybe I don’t actually make sewing patterns.

Well yes, I make sewing patterns, but maybe that’s not the main event anymore.

Maybe I design learning experiences.

The sewing pattern just happens to be the medium I’ve chosen for the last decade.

When I think back over my career, that’s the thread I can see running through all of it. It’s there in the years I’ve spent teaching university students. It’s there in Curated and now Making, Again. It’s there in the weekly Q&As, the tutorials, the essays and even the way I think about customer support.

I’ve never been particularly interested in producing more things for the sake of it. What fascinates me is helping someone move from uncertainty to confidence. I love taking something that feels overwhelming and designing a path that makes it feel possible.

That realisation has opened a little window of thought that I keep coming back to.

For a long time, when people asked what I did, I’d answer, “I make sewing patterns for home sewists.” It felt like such a specific identity that I couldn’t imagine what else I might do.

But if what I really do is design thoughtful learning experiences, then perhaps my world is slightly bigger than I realised. Maybe this little corner I feel backed into isn’t quite as small as I thought.

Maybe sewing was never the destination. Maybe it was simply the place where I discovered the kind of work I love doing. I don’t know exactly what that means yet. As usual, I am just here talking about ideas that are still half-baked, while I get my head around them.

Perhaps next year I’ll still be running In the Folds full time. Perhaps I’ll find a part-time role somewhere else while continuing to nurture this little corner of the internet. Perhaps there are businesses looking for someone with the very nerdy specific skills that I have honed for the last decade (if you know someone, maybe send them this post and we can chat!). Perhaps there are people who need help creating thoughtful learning experiences for home sewists. Or perhaps it will be something I haven’t even imagined yet.

A few weeks ago I was feeling overwhelmed by the idea that I needed to have the answer before January rolled around and that I needed to choose a path and simply get started.

But I’ve realised now that before I can decide what comes next, I first need to understand what kind of work I actually want to spend my time doing. I don’t think I’m going to figure that out by sitting at home thinking about it. I think I’m going to have to experiment.

If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that experimentation is key. Not getting caught in the idea of needing to make a decision right now, but to use play and experimentation to feel things out.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve started reaching out to friends in the indie sewing world to chat and bounce ideas around. I’ve been researching other little niches on the internet. I’ve even found myself back on Instagram, not to compare, but to just see what’s going on there. To notice what people are making, teaching and building.

I still don’t know what comes next. But I have a growing sense that clarity doesn’t arrive all at once. It emerges through conversations, tiny experiments and paying attention to what sparks your curiosity (well at least that’s my hope… as I said, I actually have no clear idea of where I’m headed).

For now I just need to trust that answers are rarely found in a vacuum.

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Over the past few months, I’ve been noticing how often my creativity gets postponed. It used to be: I’ll start when my business feels less hectic, I’ll start when I get a new sewing machine. Now it’s more like: I’ll start when the baby sleeps better. I’ll start when I have a whole afternoon. I’ll start after I make it to the fabric shop. I’ll start when I’ve sorted out my studio.

It’s rarely one big reason. More often, it’s a collection of little reasons that convince me now isn’t the right time.

Lately I’ve been wondering what would happen if I stopped waiting. What if I stopped thinking that “making” had to mean making a full outfit from pattern to garment in a series of long afternoons in my studio and that it could mean something much smaller or simpler.

What if I started paying more attention to what was already here?

The fabric I’ve long forgotten about (I know you all have some of that!), even if it’s hiding in a messy and jam-packed cupboard (which I am giving you all permission not to organise).

The pattern I’ve been meaning to sew for years.

The skills I’ve spent years building, but rarely use.

The tiny pockets of time that don’t look like much on their own, but are enough to thread a needle or hand stitch a few stitches.

That question became the starting point for our next Making, Again experiment.

What if you already have enough to begin?

For those who are new here, Making, Again is an ongoing series of gentle creative experiments for paid subscribers. Every six weeks, you’ll be invited into a new experiment. Each one is designed to help you notice, reflect and make in small, achievable ways, without the pressure to produce something “finished” or impressive.

You can think of these experiments as touchpoints rather than tasks. A chance to pause, pay attention, and reconnect with your making practice as it is right now. We’ll take it together, one experiment at a time.

Experiment 5: Enough

Our creativity is often shaped by what we think we’re missing.

More time.

More space.

More confidence.

More inspiration.

More fabric.

Enough is an invitation to gently question that way of thinking.

This isn’t about feeling bad for buying new things or feeling guilty about the size of your stash. It’s also not about making do, finishing everything you’ve started or challenging yourself not to buy fabric. Instead, it’s about shifting your attention from what’s missing to what’s already here.

This experiment is about looking at your creative world with fresh eyes and discovering what becomes possible when you begin from a place of enough.

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Before we move on to our next experiment, I’d like to take a moment to pause.

Over the past few months we’ve explored four different ways of approaching our creative practice. We’ve noticed. We’ve returned. We’ve shifted. We’ve softened.

At times these experiments may have felt small (especially if you’re comparing it to the monthly project subscription we used to run).

• A few notes in a wardrobe journal.

• Sewing a familiar pattern for the second or third time.

• Letting out a waistband.

• Choosing to spend ten minutes with a project instead of abandoning it altogether.

But small shifts have a way of accumulating.

When Courtney and I first imagined Making, Again, we weren’t interested in creating another sewing challenge or productivity framework. We weren’t interested in helping people make more.

We wanted to create space to build a different relationship with making. One that could survive changing seasons of life, fluctuating motivation and the inevitable interruptions that come with being human.

That’s why we never expected everyone to complete every experiment.

Some of you may have followed each one as it arrived. Others may have dipped in and out. Some may have downloaded every Playbook, knowing you’ll come back when life feels a little more spacious and some of you may not have started at all. None of those approaches is more “correct” than another.

The experiments aren’t a course to finish, but a collection of places to begin. Soft starting points that you can return to whenever you’re feeling disconnected from your creativity and don’t know where to start.

So before we move onto the next experiment, I wanted to take a moment to pause and look back at where we’ve been.

Experiment 1: Noticing

We began by paying attention. Rather than immediately planning the next project, we spent time observing.

• What were we actually wearing?

• What fabrics felt good?

• What colours kept showing up?

• What garments sat untouched in the wardrobe?

Noticing reminded us that our preferences already contain valuable information. We don’t always need to look outside ourselves for answers.

Experiment 2: Returning

Next we explored the idea of returning.

Instead of chasing novelty, we revisited patterns, techniques and garments we already knew. We considered what repetition might teach us and how familiarity can create confidence.

Returning challenged the idea that growth always comes from doing something new. Sometimes growth comes from going deeper on something we have worked on or thought about before.

Experiment 3: Shifting

In Shifting, we explored what happens when our bodies, lifestyles and priorities change.

We considered how our wardrobes can evolve alongside us and how making can respond to the realities of the season we’re in rather than the season we wish we were in. Shifting reminded us that change is not a problem to solve, it’s just a natural part of life.

Experiment 4: Softening

Most recently, we’ve explored Softening.

This experiment invited us to loosen our grip on expectations. To make room for lower capacity, to choose softness over pressure and to find value in small acts of creativity rather than measuring success through finished outcomes. For many of us, Softening has been a reminder that staying connected to a creative practice - even in a very small way - is sometimes enough.

Looking back

Looking across all four experiments, I notice that although each one has been different, they’ve all been pointing towards the same idea. None of them were about making more. Instead, they invited us to pay closer attention, to become more curious and to let go of the idea that there is one right way to be creative.

After almost thirty years of sewing, I’ve realised that creativity rarely returns because we force it to. It returns because we become interested again. Interested in what we’re drawn to, in what feels possible or interested in what might happen if we simply follow the next small thread of curiosity.

An experimental approach gives us permission to make without needing to know where we’ll end up. Instead of asking, What should I make next? we can ask, What happens if I try this?

Sometimes that’s enough to bring a little joy back into the process.

When we asked our community to reflect on the experiments so far, one thing became clear. Very few of you talked about finished garments. Instead, you spoke about feeling more connected to your sewing, appreciating the slower pace and finding permission to engage with creativity in ways that fit your life. For many of you, planning, reflecting and simply thinking about making had become valuable parts of the creative process, rather than things that happened before the “real” work began.

“So far it’s very interesting and I like going through the Playbooks at my own pace. I don’t have to keep to a schedule and it’s there for me to look at when I have time and motivation. I’m not sure what I expected from Making, Again but it makes me feel more connected to my sewing. I like the direction that it is going, looking at clothes and sewing in a more thoughtful way.”

“I have three kids and a full time job outside the home. Sewing is my favorite hobby, but I don’t always have time for the actual sewing. Planning, reflecting, daydreaming about sewing also counts... Making, Again prompts those actions, and then I don’t feel bad about that I can’t sew a new project every month.”

“I loved the monthly pattern subscription but it became a bit too much time wise. This feels more relaxed and allows me to look at the resources etc that I already have and make the most out of it in a more structured way.”

Reading your reflections has also highlighted something Courtney and I have been talking about behind the scenes. One of our hopes for Making, Again was that it would become a place where members could share their experiences and learn from one another. So far, that side of the community has been quieter than we’d imagined.

In many ways, I think that makes sense. The people who were most active in our old Curated community were often sewing every week. Many of the people who have found their way to Making, Again are here because life is busy, their capacity is limited or they’re looking for a gentler relationship with creativity. They’re not necessarily spending hours at the sewing machine each week and they may not have the time or energy to post regularly either. We also know that Facebook isn’t everyone’s preferred place to gather, even though it felt like the simplest option when we were getting started. It’s something we’re continuing to think about. I still believe there’s so much value in learning from one another, hearing different perspectives and discovering that someone else has experienced the very thing you’ve been feeling. I’m not sure exactly what that looks like yet, but I’m curious to keep exploring it together.

“It would be good to see more engagement, I mean from members I suppose. I know this is a really tricky one for people, we’re probably mostly quiet introverts sat at home sewing away! I have tried to contribute a bit, but not managed loads, so I understand. It’s nice to see what other people are saying and also feel a bit nervous putting myself out there. It’s also a bit confusing having some threads where readers contribute on Facebook and some on Substack.”

“I would like to see more activity - more posts from members. The more people are sharing, the more we get to know each other and learn from each other.”

Reading your reflections has been a wonderful reminder that these small experiments are doing exactly what we hoped they would. Not because everyone is having the same experience, but because each person is discovering something different about their own creative practice.

As you reflect on the first four experiments, I invite you to consider:

• What has surprised you?

• What have you learned about yourself?

• Which experiment felt most meaningful?

• Which ideas have stayed with you?

• Has anything changed about the way you think about making?

• What would you like to carry forward into the rest of the year?

You don’t need to have completed every activity or participated in every discussion to answer these questions. All I hope is that these experiments have helped you feel more connected to your creative self. Maybe they have got the cogs turning again or helped you feel that creativity has felt possible again.

And if you’re brave enough and time allows, please post your reply in our Facebook group so that we can get that conversation going like so many of us are craving.

Making, Again was never designed to be something you complete. It’s an invitation to pay attention to your creative life and to approach it with curiosity.

Whether you’ve completed every experiment, tried one or simply been reading along, I hope these Playbooks become something you return to whenever you need a gentle way back into making. Because sometimes all it takes is one small experiment. One moment of curiosity. One afternoon spent making without expectation.

Wherever you are right now, you’re welcome here.

Let’s carry these ideas with us as we begin the next experiment that will be coming next week.

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I’m in that weird phase of postpartum life where I’m starting to come up for air, but still don’t have the energy, capacity or support to do much more than pure survival.

I think this place took longer to get to with my first, but this time around, my landing into motherhood has felt softer. Easier. My body healed faster, the shock to the system was less shocking. I am less fragmented and I guess I have more trust in myself and this process. My standards of what counts as “acceptable” have also drastically dropped. Just this morning I decided that sleep was far more important than getting up earlier to make the morning run smoother. This meant, though, that I forfeited a shower, and the morning did feel quite stressful as I zipped around the house trying to get my eldest ready for preschool, packing her lunch, making us breakfast (a win that I even managed breakfast for myself), while my partner rushed out the door for work. You win some, you lose some.

Because of this tentative step back into the “normal” world, I got a little bit excited about what this meant. I had a few weeks of writing endless to-do lists of what I needed to get done during the day while my eldest was in preschool and I just had my youngest at home. Life admin, phone providers to change, daycares to tour for the baby, groceries to order, gifts to buy, snacks to bake, trips to plan, playbooks to create, Substacks to write… I’d wake up feeling optimistic about the day and then wind up feeling frustrated at the end of it when I’d barely gotten anything done.

I’d tell myself that the next day was a new day and I just needed to try harder, work smarter or be more disciplined. And then I’d fail again. Or even worse for the psyche, I would somehow manage to get an hour of something done and then naively believe this was the “new normal” and try to repeat it all the next day. It never worked.

Do you notice something about the list of things I was “supposed” to be doing? It doesn’t include taking care of my baby. My four month old baby who I exclusively breastfeed and take care of every day. The same baby that stays up late and refuses to nap in her bassinet during the day. It seems obvious as soon as I write it down that of course I am not making a dent in my endless to-do list. Of course I am feeling frustrated and overwhelmed. I have a four month old who can do absolutely nothing for herself (rightly so).

While trying to work through this to-do list, I started telling myself that maybe I need to get up earlier (even though I’m up to feed the baby multiple times at night and feel exhausted on waking every day already), stay up later (even though the baby doesn’t settle for the night until about 10pm and I am completely exhausted by that point), leave my baby in the crèche at the pool so I can work in the café (even though she would hate it and probably scream for an hour straight) or work all weekend (even though this would mean missing valuable time with my eldest and leaving my partner with two kids, one who refuses to take a bottle).

That was the approach I took with my eldest at first. Late nights working, early mornings working. When her sleep disintegrated at six months old, we went to see a doctor for some support. Instead of focusing on what my baby was doing (or not doing), the doctor (rightly so) focused on what I was doing. She questioned why I was staying up late working, why I was waking before the baby to work too. She suggested that my sleep was going to be easier to change or manage than the baby’s.

Her biggest piece of advice was that I needed to go to bed when the baby did and get up when the baby did (or even after she woke, if my partner was around). It seems so simple now, but it really was the thing that helped me not completely fall apart.

It dawned on me this week, just like last time, that maybe discipline isn’t the answer. Being stricter with myself and often harder on myself is not what I need in this season. I need flexibility, I need self-compassion, I need softness.

What would I tell a friend with a four month old? I would tell her to be kind to herself. That she’s still in the very early days. I wouldn’t be telling her to work harder or smarter, to get up earlier or stay up later.

So what if instead of trying to be stricter or more disciplined, I think about a different approach?

There are times when, in my head, the things I write about here, motherhood, creativity, making and small business, seem so separate, I wonder how to make sense of all the fragments in my head. How to talk about it in a way that is interesting and makes sense to others. And then suddenly it all falls into place and I realise how linked all these themes actually are.

At the end of the day, what I’m interested in talking and writing about is identity, creativity, self-compassion, capacity and life transitions. The ways these things intersect while finding our way back to ourselves.

This week I had a lightbulb moment. What if I approached getting back to myself in the same way I found my way back to making? Through play and experimentation. Through self-compassion. Through being kinder to myself.

And before I go on, I’d like to mention that this is not about “bouncing back” to who I was before I had my baby. It’s about finding a bit of space or rhythm in my days to feel a little bit more like me. Not just me as the mother, but me as an independent person, separate from my very dependent children.

What if the goal isn’t to be more disciplined, but to participate more fully in our own lives?

When the penny dropped and I realised that discipline wasn’t the answer, I felt my chest warm and my shoulders lift. It made me think of possibility, rather than endless chores and guilt.

When we think about creating habits, we often default to discipline. Force yourself, be consistent, stack habits, push through. I am sure you’ve heard it all before. But what if it’s not about discipline or structure at all, but about leaning in more? Adding more input, more play, more experimentation and then seeing where that leads us.

Suddenly I was thinking about all the things I could focus on instead of discipline to lighten my days. To make the days a little more enjoyable. These were the ideas that came to mind:

• Experiment over discipline

• Play over discipline

• Input over discipline

• Participation over discipline

• Self-compassion over discipline

• Acceptance over discipline

• Support over discipline

• Community over discipline

It made me think that I could write a little series or try a little experiment. What if I used one of these ideas as my mantra for a little while? How would it change the shape of my days? Could it change the way I feel? Could it create a little more space in my days for me?

This week I started with the mantra “Participation over discipline”. What I mean by “participation” is how can I lean more fully into what I am doing? How can I enjoy things more? Instead of trying to find pockets of time in my day to do something creative, how can I bring more creativity into the things I am already doing?

For those who have raised little people, you will know that so much of the day in early motherhood is made up of repetitive, practical tasks. Relying on discipline alone, those tasks can feel draining and endless.

I realised that facing my days with a mindset of participation encouraged me to find hidden opportunities for creativity, care, problem-solving or connection inside ordinary moments.

Some ways I’ve leaned into participation this week:

Something new to scroll

I had been feeling conscious of how much time I spend scrolling on my phone. I’m sure that any of you who have breastfed or had a contact napping baby will know that having a phone to scroll on is a great relief, but also becomes very addictive.

I decided to download Duolingo (a language learning app). My partner is Spanish and he communicates with our children in Spanish. I have been learning Spanish on and off for years, so I have a basic level. We are planning a trip to Spain this year so I decided it’s time to brush up on my Spanish. Having something else to do on my phone when I’m nap-trapped, or trying to stay awake during an overnight feed, helps me feel more engaged and more like myself. I’m not expecting myself to turn to it every time I pick up my phone, but even if I do it sometimes, it makes a difference.

Returning to baking

I have been baking. I’ve always enjoyed baking, although I’m not particularly good or experienced. But I enjoy the precision of it. It’s a bit like pattern making, with rules to follow and techniques to learn. Although getting to my sewing machine feels completely impossible at the moment, getting to the kitchen to bake feels manageable, and it seems to scratch the creativity itch.

It’s something I can research while nap-trapped, scrolling recipes, adding ingredients to our online grocery order or, even better, raiding the fridge and pantry for ingredients that need to be used and then finding recipes to incorporate them. It’s something I can do while my eldest is fluffing around or even with her if she feels like it. It’s something I can do with my youngest in her bouncer or strapped to my chest in a carrier on the days she doesn’t want to be put down. I can mix the ingredients one-handed with a baby on my hip. I can stop partway and come back, unlike cooking a meal.

Dressing my daughter

My eldest daughter is three and a half and very into clothes. She likes “spinny” dresses, costumes and anything sparkly. This week I decided to have more fun while getting her dressed. Rather than getting her to pick, choosing whatever I saw first or trying to convince her she can’t wear a polyester Elsa dress to kindy when it’s 15 degrees outside, I decided to choose something fun she could wear and see dressing her as an exercise in creativity. I chose a pink tracksuit, purple beanie, undershirt and socks to match her cute but ridiculous wool plaits she made at preschool. She was thrilled. We both had a great time getting her dressed, and although all I can manage for myself at the moment is finding a pair of jeans that isn’t covered in baby spew, dressing her feels simpler and more fun.

Saying yes to conversation

I’ve been walking down to our local café to try to get a little bit of work done. I walk until the baby falls asleep in the pram and then I cherish a hot cup of tea next to my laptop. I sit outside, where my baby seems to be lulled to sleep by the passing cars. The last two times I’ve been there I have talked to a lovely woman who stopped to ask about the baby. Instead of just answering her questions quickly and getting back to my work, I leaned into the conversation, asking questions about her children, her background and her experience with babies. It could be so easy to politely nod and then get back to work, but these conversations make me feel more connected to my community and the other mothers who have trodden the path before me.

Gift wrapping

I recently made wrapping paper with my daughter. We spread out some big sheets of paper and her markers and spent some time playing with colours and shapes. A few days later, I used those pages to wrap gifts for a friend’s new baby. I could have bought wrapping paper or reached for one of the countless gift bags in the cupboard, but there was something special about using something I’d made with my little one to welcome another little one into the world.

The result

With these small actions, I realised that I enjoyed the thing I was doing more. I felt more engaged, less bored, less like I was just following the same routine every day.

Participation isn’t about doing the quickest thing, it’s about doing the thing, as a friend likes to say, that “makes you feel something.” It’s about transforming an ordinary task into an act of care. Care for myself or for someone else.

What I realised with this little experiment is that what initially sounded like “more work” actually created more space. I found myself making time for these things because they filled my cup. And each night, I’m falling into bed feeling a little bit more like myself. A little more energised, excited and engaged, with the question I start my days with often being, “How can I participate more?” instead of “How can I survive this?”

How could you participate more in the things that make up your day?

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I’ve spent this week feeling guilty. How can I possibly talk about making again, when I am, in fact, not making at all? The struggle of finding ways to carve out time, energy and resources for making and creativity are subjects I can write about until the cows come home. It is my current existence. That feeling that maybe this week is the one where I might just get it together for thirty minutes of creative time or that I might be able to get to the fabric store on the way back from daycare drop off to pick up the embroidery supplies I need to start the project I talked about here.

In reality, I am only just keeping it together.

I am writing this from a cafe with my sleeping baby in the pram next to me (the ambient noise seems to help), quickly dropping my mouse and rocking the pram back and forth every time I see her wiggle. The trips to the fabric store that I imagine suddenly fall to the bottom of the list the moment I remember that the baby has decided that instead of sleeping in the car as we drive, she’d rather scream.

But does it make me hypocritical that I can talk about the struggle, present solutions and ideas through our Playbooks, but then not be able to action them myself?

After spending a little time pondering this predicament between breastfeeds, tummy time and daycare pickups, I realised something. Maybe the idea of Making, Again isn’t always about returning to the thing you thought you’d return to.

When we launched this project, when I was heavily pregnant and with only a faint idea of what life was going to look like with two little people, I imagined myself back in my garage sewing studio, at least occasionally.

When I had my eldest daughter in 2022, I had an external studio space. Getting there became completely impossible and the guilt of the expense, coupled with the inability to use it, was heavy. For many reasons, we decided to move a little further out into the suburbs to get a little more space and a dedicated work-from-home space for me, in the hope it would make things easier.

And it did.

With my preschooler, I could get chunks of work done while she pottered about in the garden or did some drawing on my big table. With a baby though, it’s not so simple.

I dreamt that maybe this time I would get one of those magical unicorn babies who sleep in their bassinets during the day and put themselves to sleep. Alas, my partner and I don’t make those ones. We make the ones that want to be held for most of the day and want to make sure you are always in their sight. A cuddle on the couch is the ideal place for a nap, although a nipple in the mouth for the entirety of the nap makes it even more successful. Don’t try to go to the toilet alone. There will be screaming!

Thankfully, this time it has been less of a shock. I now know that it’s completely biologically normal for my little bub to need so much from me. And because I have lived it before, I know it’s not forever. I know the time to try to get things done is when she’s awake, and when she’s asleep I need to rest too, even if it is just scrolling my phone or watching Netflix.

When I have to pop into my garage studio to grab something, I see that the table that was once covered in pattern pieces and patternmaking tools has now disappeared beneath piles and bags of clothes that belong to my girls. Little Wondersuits, dresses that no longer fit, generously gifted hand-me-downs waiting to be sorted.

A project for another day, I keep telling myself.

In this moment, getting back to sewing isn’t just about finding the motivation, energy and supplies. It’s about finding an uninterrupted stretch of time long enough to make the studio functional again. At the moment, that feels impossible.

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One of the questions I answered for our Q&A newsletter recently was how to stop feeling overwhelmed by sewing projects when you’re still learning.

I loved this question because I don’t actually think it only applies to beginners. Even after years of sewing, I can still feel daunted by a new project. It may be because of the time required to get going, a tricky fit problem to resolve or some techniques I haven’t done in a while.

It made me think about the way many of us approach sewing.

We buy a pattern, choose a fabric and then mentally commit to making the entire garment from beginning to end. The project becomes one enormous task. No wonder it can feel overwhelming before we’ve even cut into the fabric.

I’ll be the first to admit that In the Folds patterns aren’t patterns you’re likely to finish in an afternoon. They’re not supposed to be. They’re detailed. The techniques are thoughtful. They’re designed to build your skills and give you confidence, while creating garments that become lasting pieces in your wardrobe.

But perhaps we’ve been thinking about the timeline all wrong. During Curated the aim was to work through one project a month. I know for many, this felt inspiring and exciting, while for others it felt like too much pressure or completely impossible.

What if instead of thinking that a project that needed to be completed in a day or a weekend, we gave ourselves an entire season?

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I’ve been thinking a lot about capacity at the moment. How it stretches and shrinks. I remember boldly asking a friend when I was pregnant with my eldest, “What will I actually be doing all day?” The thought that my days would be completely consumed by someone so tiny who just slept and ate was completely unbelievable to me. My friend (who had already had two children) laughed and gave me a look that I now understand. The look that says, “I don’t want to scare you, but you have no idea what’s coming for you.” She was right, I couldn’t compare running a small business to looking after an infant.

After having my first baby, I watched my capacity shrink to nothing. Even having a shower or a hot cup of tea seemed questionable. But as she grew, started daycare and finally let my partner settle her, slowly my capacity stretched again. I was able to run my business in a regular way, socialise and even shower whenever I pleased!

Then number two came along and everything shrunk again. Thankfully this time, I know that capacity is elastic. It will stretch again, and I know that somehow I’ll be running my business, looking after my two little girls and maybe even exercising in the not-too-distant future.

What has been refreshing this time is this belief that I won’t always feel like this. That I won’t always need to schedule or plan every tiny thing I do for myself in advance. Just yesterday, I was counting down the minutes until I could hand our children over to my partner when he finished his work day so I could finally shower. Blast the hot water, lather up the soap and make my own little warm, sound-proof bubble where I could just breathe and be an independent person for a few minutes. It seems almost unbelievable that soon enough this will be a regular part of my day that doesn’t need to be planned in advance.

My capacity will stretch again and this time I know it. I am spending less time wondering if I have become less capable, less organised, less motivated… (Although I am not going to lie, there are definitely still moments where I am sure I have become less intelligent.) I’m working on trusting that my capacity has shrunk in some areas, as it’s needed to expand to be a mother. That it is my number one role right now.

This concept is at the centre of the idea of ‘Softening.’ The idea that our capacity isn’t static. Just because something feels difficult now, doesn’t mean it will always be that way.

So often we try to force ourselves to create as though our capacity never changes. We set goals based on who we were six months ago or five years ago, and then feel guilty when we can’t meet them.

I’d like to invite you to stop fighting against the reality of the season you’re in. To lower the bar where it needs lowering.

Right now, can you take a few minutes to think about the following questions?

• Can you choose a smaller project?

• How can you take the project you have had in mind and whittle it down to its most simple form?

• Can you spend some time sorting fabric instead of sewing, if sewing itself feels out of reach?

• How can you make room for making to exist alongside everything else?

Softening isn’t about doing less forever. It’s about trusting that capacity will stretch again. And in the meantime, treating ourselves with enough gentleness that we don’t lose our connection to making while we wait.

And on the theme of capacity, I am keeping things short and sweet today. I am writing this essay while bouncing my baby in her bouncer and she is currently gurgling away asking for a little bit of attention. Instead of pushing through to write another two paragraphs, I’m reminding myself that this is where my capacity is at today, and that’s okay.

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Lately I’ve been thinking about what actually counts as making, and realising that this has changed throughout different seasons of my life.

In my teenage years, when I had endless time and very few responsibilities (and a body that didn’t really require darts to make fabric fit it), making meant picking up whatever I felt like wearing that night and piecing it together in weird and wonderful ways, without worrying too much about seam finishes.

In my twenties, making became about education. I was doing my Bachelor of Fashion and Textiles and learning how to sew “properly” with industrial techniques and new machinery to match. Making became high stakes and stressful as time became more limited and the expectations grew higher.

In my late twenties I worked on finding my way back to playful making through starting a blog, going back to the basics of pattern making, and playing with colour and print.

In my thirties I lost touch with making for pleasure as my business demanded so much of me and left very little room for hobbies.

Then I had children and realised it was time to redefine what making is for what feels like the twentieth time. What I’m noticing as I think about making in this season is that I’m more accepting of it being different from what it once was.

For a long time, making meant choosing a project, picking a fabric, gathering supplies, carving out a chunk of uninterrupted time, making a toile (or two) and then, ideally, making the “real” thing. I have accepted that, in this season, making by that definition would be completely impossible. I’m currently breastfeeding my three-and-a-half-month-old while typing this draft on my phone, so the thought of even doing one of those things would take weeks.

When I think about this idea of making that has a clear start and end point, with the start being an idea and the end being something I can show for it, a top, a dress, a toile or an idea for a new pattern, I realise that what I actually miss is not the output. It’s not the need for a new jacket or dress, but the time at my sewing machine. The feeling of anticipation as I thread the machine, press my foot down on the pedal and turn on the iron, ready for beautiful crisp seams. None of that is dependent on me finishing anything.

And that’s where I’m at in this season. I’m realising that what I crave is not the finished garment or even the garment itself, but the process of being there in a state of flow, even if it’s just for a few minutes.

I recognised this shift in my thinking this week when my partner pointed to an unravelled seam on the crotch of his pants and asked me to fix it. A past version of me would have dreaded the thought of it. It would have felt like time taken away from a “real” project. But the person I am now sees that mending a pair of pants, literally sewing one small row of stitches, will be enough to leave me feeling connected to myself as a maker.

After all, it’s not just one row of stitches. It’s me walking into my studio, taking the cover off my machine, picking up my pins and my snips, threading the machine with black thread, stitching over the seam and pressing it. It won’t take long, but it will remind me of the feeling I get when I sit at my machine, the one I’ve had ever since I was a child.

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There are piles of my daughter’s drawings all over our house.

On the dining table.
Rolled up beside the easel.
Taped to the walls.
Stuffed into drawers.

I know most parents probably say this, but she’s actually very good. Some of them stop me in my tracks. The confidence and creativity of them. The fruit bat with the giant wings, that only became a fruit bat when she realised it didn’t quite look like me. The wonky little faces. The teeth! Who knew smiley faces with teeth could be so terrifying and hilarious? I am amazed by the way she fills a page without hesitation.

And yet, despite how much I love them, I’ve started to feel overwhelmed by them too. There are simply so many. I sometimes try to sneak some of the “non-masterpieces” into the recycling bin and she inevitably finds them and asks why I had to throw out her artwork.

Her easel has a giant roll of paper attached to it, which means she can create endlessly. And she does. Every day there are new drawings, new stories, new “masterpieces” she urgently needs me to look at while I’m making dinner or feeding the baby or trying to answer a text message with one hand.

At first I started photographing them, thinking that would solve the problem. A way to keep them without physically keeping them. But then what? What do I do with them then?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about whether there’s another way to hold onto some of them. Something more tangible, that doesn’t involve turning our house into a toddler gallery. Something that turns them into part of our home and our history instead of another digital archive I’ll probably never revisit.

You may wonder why I’m talking about my daughter’s little doodles and what connection they have to sewing or to the current Making, Again experiment.

I keep imagining a quilt or a tablecloth covered in her tiny doodles. How fun it would be to create the weird little shapes and creative colour combinations with needle and thread. Something imperfect and layered and full of this particular season of life. Something she could hold one day.

When I started working through the Softening Playbook, this is what came to mind for me, as

it’s something that isn’t designed to be completed quickly. It will be an ongoing project - not days or weeks, but likely months or even years. It is something I can work on in pockets of time without my sewing machine. While I’m contact napping with my baby or while sitting outside on a rug while she kicks her little legs and I drink my third cup of tea for the day.

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I’m currently on maternity leave and I feel somewhat suffocated by what this stage of parenting feels like. “Suffocated” is probably too strong a word, but it’s the one that comes to mind. The second time around, the feeling feels the same, but less upsetting, as I know it won’t be like this forever. I am much more prepared to ride the wave this time and accept each day as it comes. This time I truly know how temporary it all is. One day my daughter will eat from a source that is not my body. She will sleep on a surface that is not my chest. She will be able to communicate with more than tears. And I will miss these days where I can soothe her (most of the time) with so little.

When thinking about the next experiment (the first that I have created since having my baby in February), I wanted to think about this feeling I currently have. The feeling of being so stretched for resources - time, energy, money and sleep and wondering how creativity can fit amongst it all. My studio is currently packed up - my sewing machines are covered and my desk is sprawled with tubs and bags of clothing for my daughters that need to be sorted, stored or passed along. I am the full time carer of my three month old.

When I think about making things, I feel guilty. Guilty that there’s no space for it. Guilty about the resources sitting untouched in my stash just metres from where I write this. As I thought about it, I realised that it doesn’t take being a parent to a new baby to feel like this. So many of us feel so stretched for many reasons - caring for others, working too much, being in poor health, being stressed - how can we remain in touch with our creativity without it feeling like another chore or something else that’s competing for resources?

I have been thinking about how I can have a softer relationship with making. If I want to be connected to my creativity for the long haul, the relationship needs to leave room for changing energy levels, shifting priorities, a messy house, tired brains and the reality of being a person with a full life outside of sewing.

Something I have come to accept is that not every season is built for ambitious projects. Sometimes creativity looks like:

• Tracing a pattern while your dinner cooks

• Mending or altering something instead of starting from scratch

• Stitching a few rows of embroidery while watching something trashy on television.

• Rearranging your fabric stash to get a better idea of what you already have

• Thinking about making without necessarily making anything at all.

And I think there’s something important in that.

Because somewhere along the way, many of us have learned to measure creativity (and everything else we do) by output. By finished garments, momentum and how much we can make, share or achieve. But what if creativity could also be restorative? Gentle? Spacious? What if making could meet us where we are, instead of demanding we become someone else first?

When you read these words do your lungs fill up like mine do? I find that the guilt turns to relief and creativity feels a little more possible when I lower the stakes and my expectations of what creativity should look like right now.

The next experiment - Softening - is about loosening your grip a little, and finding a gently way to stay connected to making.

Making, Again is an ongoing series of gentle creative experiments for paid subscribers. Every six weeks, we explore a new theme together through reflection, conversation and low-pressure creative prompts. The experiments are designed to help you reconnect with your creativity in ways that feel achievable within real life, not separate from it.

You can think of them as touchpoints rather than tasks. Small invitations to notice what’s going on beneath the surface of your making practice and to respond with curiosity instead of criticism.

This experiment is about softening the edges a little.

Softening expectations.
Softening timelines.
Softening the idea that creativity only “counts” when it results in something finished or useful.

Instead, we’ll explore what it looks like to make in ways that feel comforting, playful, grounding or nourishing. To follow energy instead of forcing it. To create space for creativity to exist in smaller, quieter forms.

What you’ll find in the Playbook for this Experiment

Inside the Playbook, you’ll find gentle reflections, prompts and Making Experiments designed to help you reconnect with your creativity without pressure. Some are practical. Some are reflective. Some may not involve sewing clothing at all.

You might find yourself:

• returning to a forgotten handcraft

• making something tiny and low-stakes

• creating a comforting ritual around creativity

• noticing the seasons of your energy and attention

• exploring what rest and creativity have to do with one another

• letting yourself make slowly, imperfectly or inconsistently

None of this is about doing creativity “properly.”

It’s about remembering that your creative practice belongs to you. It can shift and change alongside your life. It can become quieter when needed and it can pause and return. It can soften.

👉 Download the Playbook below

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Six weeks ago we invited you into an experiment about making with change rather than in spite of it. About loosening the grip on fixed measurements, finished edges and final fits, and seeing what might be possible if our clothes responded to us instead of the other way around.

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