About Chantelle Brightbill

Chantelle Brightbill is a modern quilt designer with a strong commitment to sustainable materials. She wants the art you put on your bed to be as beautiful as the art you hang on your walls.

January 23, 2013

When You Can’t Do It All

screen print by James Brown – click for info

When I was young I used to love our annual visits to the family of my mum’s sister. They were such interesting people, particularly my aunt. Her many and varied hobbies included wildlife rescue work, auto mechanics, and fashion, and she often accompanied her sleepercutter (lumberjack) husband into the forest to fell trees. What an exciting life she seemed to lead. My own mother seemed so mundane by comparison.

I once asked my mother why she didn’t do more fun stuff like that, and she told me something that has stuck with me. She said, “All of that would be interesting but I would still have to do all my housework when I got home, and I just cannot do it all.”  I felt very annoyed on her part, and resented how my dad was keeping her down, stopping her from being fulfilled. Of course, the issue was not so clear cut as that; Mum wasn’t really a dull housewife and Dad was not a domineering taskmaster. My mother loves handcrafts, music, and books, and she made time to sing, sew, and tutor kids. My dad, while saying a woman belongs in the home, taught me to roof and gutter and supported my ambition to enter the trades.

As a work-at-home mother to young children, I am really trying to do and have it all, the thing my mother said she could not do. And right now we are remodeling a room in our home, turning the master bedroom into an amazing playroom. My husband and I are doing the work ourselves, and instead of the usual struggle I have to balance housework, mothering, and my business, I have hit right up against the blunt reality that I truly cannot do it all. Not “I can’t do it all as well as I like,” but that it is physically impossible. And the thing I enjoy so much, building things, is the thing I feel like I shouldn’t do.

I discovered the real person holding me down is me.

Luckily for me my husband won’t let me get away with that. His nudges for me to hire help range from the pragmatic — “a teenager to watch the kids is cheaper than a carpenter” — to the sarcastic — “it sure is lucky that when you are working big days we all stop eating and wearing clothes.” So I have hired help. And I hate it. I feel guilty and annoyed and lazy to need other people in this way. Even when the housework is a hated obligation, it is hard to give the task to another person who won’t do it exactly right.

So what is the answer, and where does all this lead? I don’t know. I hope I will get better at letting go with practice. I know that it is different for everyone, but I hope some of you can offer ideas or support.

All I know is that I am pushing ahead and trying, and that is all anyone can do.

Filed Under: Plot Notes, The Setting Tagged With: , 6 Comments
December 19, 2012

Those Monsters in the Mirror

As the year comes to an end it is time to set new goals for the new year, but I also start looking at what I have achieved this year. You know all those goals I set this time last year? The ones I mostly didn’t reach?

I didn’t get the library of patterns written, I didn’t develop a big wholesale business, and I didn’t even run a half marathon in under two hours.

I am a failure. 

But what happens when I look at it without all the drama? What can my failures tell me?

My biggest fail was time. I simply imagined I would have a lot more of it than I did. I had a newborn, a 2 year-old, and a kindergartener, and the combination was a huge time sink. I also didn’t manage my time very well. I procrastinated. I generally think that procrastination is a symptom, not the disease itself, so I ask what would have happened if I was very successful this year? I probably would have killed myself with work. I procrastinated instead of admitting to myself that I was not able to handle that kind of commitment. Wholesale is still a goal, and I did get a few accounts, I just need to be realistic about what I can really handle.

Why didn’t I get a fat catalog of patterns written? It was because writing patterns is hard. It twists my brain around in knots and leaves me mentally exhausted. I cannot write a pattern each week and take care of everything else. So instead I am making a more modest goal of releasing a new pattern every month, and promoting it better. Volume is not the goal, quality work and sales are.

And why didn’t I break two hours in the half marathon? All of the above.

I exhausted myself with all my faux working and didn’t take enough time to train.

Realising all of this — that I did not fail because I am a failure, but rather it was a combination of over ambitious goals and bad management — helps me see clearly what I can achieve, and start the new year with better goals and without those monsters in the rearview mirror.

Filed Under: Plot Notes Tagged With: , , 2 Comments
November 28, 2012

A Real Day Off

Heavily Laden by Hannah Shepheard

A while back I went hiking in the mountains with my family. Just some quiet family time, enjoying nature. After I stopped for the umpteenth time to photograph some random thing, my husband said, very casually, “If I had realized you would be working I probably wouldn’t have come.”  Oops.

I am sure everyone realizes that when you are running your own business from home it is so easy to be always working. That goes double if you are doing something artistic. Even when you designate family time or “me” time, work seems to creep in. I am not very good at shutting it all off.

I thought I was saving time by multitasking family time as creative time.

But then I discovered how great a real day off can be. Oddly enough it wasn’t even intentional. My sons had been begging me to plant a vegetable garden with them. I did some research and decided to build a “Square Foot Garden.”

So we bought supplies, built the boxes, filled them, and then planted the seeds. All in one day, without me spending any time thinking about my business.

It was one of the best days ever.

Since then I have been actively seeking real down time, and I have discovered that I need to actively prepare for it. Here is what I need to do:

Work First 
It is never ever all done, but I try to make sure there is nothing urgent even if I have to get up early to finish up some tasks before having fun.

Plan Something
Because my work is often sedentary, I like to do something active, but anything that engages your mind and/or body will work. For me, unstructured down time becomes work time.

Don’t Just Observe
It is an easy role for many artistic types, but the mind will wander. If I sit on the sand and watch my kids splash in the water, pretty soon I start sketching ideas, but if I get in there and start building sand castles, too, I can really switch over to family time.

Disconnect
It is not a real day off if you check your email 16 times. I need to turn off the internet on my phone, leave my sketch book at home, and hand the camera over to my husband.

What strategies do you have for making your day off a real day off?

Filed Under: Buy You, For You, The Setting Tagged With: , , 5 Comments
October 24, 2012

Do You Have a Brains Trust?

Opposites Attract by Arts Autobiographical

There is nothing like being in a group of like minded people, everyone encouraging each others’ creativity. I go to a quilt guild meeting and I am surrounded by people who get it. They understand how complicated some techniques are, and why I do what I do. It is an amazing feeling. But as wonderful as that is, spending all my time with those type of people is bad for my business.

Sometimes it is better to be around people who don’t get it and who care about making money, not following your bliss.

Getting outside the creative box can bring surprising insights. Here are a few of the people I go to for advice that would never come from an artist.

The Engineer. This person is all about logic and precision, and they love solving problems. Are your methods and processes efficient? Do you need help figuring out the best way to lay out trade or craft show booth? This person can give you so much help.

The Businessperson. This is the person you go to when you need advice from the other side about scaling, selling, and monetizing. It can be useful to hear from someone who doesn’t make it personal, and is focused on the bottom line and not the journey.

The Cheapskate. This is the cheapest person you know. She is the one who says stuff like, “I would never pay more than $20 for this!” It is a harsh dash of reality to hear, but a blunt cheapskate forces you to evaluate how much value you are offering and whether you really can sell a product or service at a profit.

The Fan. This is the person who loves everything you do, even if they really don’t get how or why you do it. Sometimes you need to be told you are an artist and are fabulous and wonderful, but it is also useful to see how an everyman type of buyer looks at your offerings. What do they really gravitate toward?

You might be saying right now that you don’t have these kind of people available. Look again at your circle of friends; you probably know people like this who would love to help you out.

Who do you have in your Brains Trust? Let me know any characters I have missed!

Filed Under: Buy You, For You Tagged With: , 4 Comments
September 6, 2012

Are You Talking in a Way that People Understand?

image by Danielle Feliciano – click for info

My eighth grade math teacher hated me. Well maybe not hate, but she didn’t want me in her class, and I admit I gave her good reason.

I would sit in the back row and talk to my friends while she lectured, then read the text-book to figure things out for myself. Usually at the end of class, she would assign homework in the form of ‘finish this exercise’ which I would conveniently forget about. I would refuse to study, and when I sat for a test I would finish very quickly. When she reminded me to check my work before I turned it in, I would pretend to, but really just play around.

I was bored by the way she taught, and as a result I was obnoxious and disruptive.

I can hear all you teachers out there grinding your teeth. End result? An average test score of 95%.

How annoying that must have been to her. I was refusing to do everything she felt was necessary to learn, and I was still doing well. So when she called my parents in to parent teacher interviews, she had trouble giving them a reason for why I should change my study habits. (My parents did give me grief about being disrespectful and talking in class.)

We endured each other for a year, and then the next year I got a different teacher. She watched the class for a while and then gave us new seating assignments. I was seated toward the middle and against the wall. She wouldn’t let me sit next to my best friend anymore either. My new seat mate was almost failing math. She encouraged us to look at the examples in the textbook while she explained new concepts.

Turns out my new teacher had been studying different learning styles. She knew I got nothing out of her lectures, and I learned best by reading and doing. And the very best way for me to cement something in my mind was to explain it to someone else. She cleverly manipulated things so I was less disruptive, more focused, and helping one her weakest students (my new seat mate). She tried to tweak things for everyone else to help them use their strengths, too.

But what does this have to do with your business? Well I have been working toward teaching my craft. I had never actually taken a quilting class; I learned everything from books and online tutorials. So I took an online class to get a perspective.

Watching the video tutorials (which were actually a pretty good explanation of the topic), made me want to turn to the kid sitting next to me and talk about my plans for the weekend. It was just like a lecture in 8th grade math.

I was missing out because the information was presented in a way I that I find difficult to process.

I assume it was made by someone who learned differently from me and had created a lesson for their learning style only. If that online quilting class had included text content that I could browse while I listened, what a difference that would have made.

It got me asking, am I missing out on customers because of the way I communicate my message? Listening while someone explains is a good way for some people to learn and understand. For other people (like me), text with examples gets a message across much more clearly. Of course, it is really a lot more complex than that, but that is the basic idea.

Are you focusing your web content, patterns, tutorials, etc. at people who communicate the same way as yourself? If so, you are missing out on a large chunk of the market who may love what you are offering, if only you showed it to them in a way they understood.

Are you talking to your customers in the way that they understand best?

Filed Under: Buy You, For You Tagged With: , , 2 Comments