A Series of Embroidery Epiphanies

Is it just me, or do your ideas also seem to take ages to actually become usable? Without counting the buildings and shops I’d stitched in previous years, my idea to focus solely on stitching things inspired by places wasn’t even planted in my brain until early 2022, and didn’t really start to sprout until the middle of 2023. Even now, half way through 2024, the idea is continually changing and evolving, and I’m only just getting started on my portfolio of embroidered Australian places! When it comes to new ideas, I feel like we expect that cartoon style light bulb moment where the perfect thing comes into our brain fully formed and ready to get started, but more often than not my ideas come together like a puzzle over a (really bloody long) period of time. 

I’ve been wanting to share for a while now about the three little puzzle pieces that eventually came together in my brain to become what is essentially the entire purpose of my business, and why the idea of celebrating small towns resonated with me so much. 

Puzzle Piece #1 - The Globe

Remember back in early 2022 when a lot of Australia was still locked down and we all started our days with Wordle (and an ever-growing list of variations)? My favourite was a game called Worldle, where you are shown the silhouette of a country and have six attempts to guess it correctly. I enjoyed playing but quickly realised that my geographical knowledge is VERY limited, and I decided (and then spent the rest of the year reminding Josh) that I wanted a globe for my birthday in December. 

Fast forward to my birthday, and I finally got my globe! It had been a while since I’d played Worldle, so in an attempt to educate myself and actually use my globe rather than just let it sit and look pretty, I made up my own extended version of the game. Every day, with the help of my globe, I would guess the country on Worldle. Then, once I’d guessed correctly, I would watch a YouTube video about the history of the country, as well as a vlog of someone travelling there.

One day, the Worldle country was Slovakia, and I watched a vlog of a couple visiting a beautiful mountain village called Čičmany. The village is filled with black timber houses decorated with traditional folk patterns and surrounded by pots of colourful flowers - an inherently stitchable combination. This imagery lit up my creative brain which very hastily told me “OH MY GOD you should TOTALLY take your cute little game even FURTHER and stitch a piece of architecture from EVERY country in the WHOLE ENTIRE WORLD EVERY!! SINGLE!! DAY!!!!”.

While I would LOVE to stitch one of these buildings one day, thankfully it didn’t take me long to realise that not every country is home to a world-first folk architecture reserve, and that this would obviously be a ridiculously involved undertaking. The idea was all but dismissed, until Puzzle Piece #2 materialised a few months later…

Puzzle Piece #2 - DIY Daisy, Outback Tom, and Back Roads

In January 2023, DIY Daisy shared that her friend Outback Tom would be featuring in an episode of Back Roads on ABC. This was the first time I’d ever heard of both Outback Tom and Back Roads, but a show about small Australian towns instantly piqued my interest and I watched Tom’s episode the night it aired. 

Turns out Back Roads is filled with stories of incredible people, businesses and communities in regional Australia, and is exactly the type of TV show that I love to watch. The best part was that I was VERY late to the Back Roads party, and there were already about eight seasons for me to catch up on and be inspired by! I wish I could remember the exact episode that sparked my next epiphany, but one day I was watching Back Roads and the idea to stitch things inspired by places reemerged in my brain, but with one little nuance.

This time, my internal monologue (it may have even been my external monologue - I was pretty excited) was yelling “OHHHH OKAY so actually instead of stitching things from all around the whole WORLD I should buy a MAP and do a virtual ROAD TRIP where I stitch something from every town around AUSTRALIA!!!”. 

Being a big fan of both real-life road trips as well as watching road trip content on YouTube (Jack and Megan are our favourites in case you want some travel inspo!), this puzzle piece instantly made the idea feel more closely aligned with who I am and what I want my business to be, and I was one step closer to a usable concept.  

Puzzle Piece #3 - Oh, I Guess I Have That Marketing Degree?

In August 2023, after nearly five years of part-time study, I submitted the last assignment for my Bachelor of Business (Marketing), and in January 2024 I received my degree certificate in the mail. While these were objectively pretty big moments in my life, I didn’t really feel like I’d achieved anything, nor did I have any desire to pursue a career in marketing, and I was worried that I’d wasted a large part of the last five years of my life (not to mention the hefty sum of money that I now owe to the Australian Government).

When I started my business degree in 2019, I initially chose to major in accounting (can you imagine?) but switched to marketing in 2021 because I felt that it would be more valuable in growing my own business. The 18 months or so leading up to that decision had been pretty amazing for Lindsay Stitches; I’d finished my first embroidery journal, won some awards, started a second year-long project, started selling kits, and built a highly engaged audience of over 10,000 people in the process. I’d achieved all of this by authentically and intuitively telling stories from my life through the art of embroidery, and I could only imagine that studying marketing would elevate that success and make me better at sharing my work.

Instead, it did kind of the opposite. All of the content that I was consuming was so dry and corporate-focussed (pretty weird given that I attended the only university in a state made up of 97% small businesses), and I was so jaded by all of the logic and rationale that I felt like my natural way of marketing myself was wrong, and I basically stopped sharing my embroidery altogether. Even though I get super positive feedback from actual real life people when I do post about my work and stories, I’ve been struggling to jump back on the consistent sharing train ever since.

Early in 2024, I had my next big realisation. I am very aware that making and selling art is seldom a lucrative business activity. But at its heart, making art is not REALLY the core purpose of my business. What I ACTUALLY want to do is use embroidery as a vehicle for sharing and celebrating small towns and local businesses, encouraging other people to visit and support them, and motivating myself to get out and explore more too! I LOVE visiting new places, and talking about things that I love feels natural to me, but I think it’s thanks to my marketing degree (with a little help from Kelsey and Kalie at Have and Hold Marketing) that I was finally able to recognise that THIS is what my business is actually about. The final puzzle piece really manifested as an understanding and appreciation that while my degree IS advantageous (even though I don’t feel like I’m utilising it), it’s also okay for me to disregard some of the corporate crapola (why on earth am I comparing my tiny business to billion dollar companies anyway?!) and share in a way that feels intuitive and authentic to me.

So, with the somehow very complex three-piece puzzle now complete in my brain, my goal is to try and focus on creating more embroidery work that puts a spotlight on small towns, to learn about (and try to visit!) these new places in the process of stitching them, and to share my stitching in a fun and authentic way to connect with people from all around Australia. If you see me post anything over the coming weeks/months, I am probably feeling very self-conscious and desperately in need of a motivational pep talk, so please feel free to remind me that I kind of know what I’m doing.