Let me share a small secret and tell you what I am working on at the moment and how the story began.
The story goes like this: when I lost my job 2 years ago and decided never to work for wages again but to become my own employer, the local music school suggested that I, as someone who sews, should start making instrument bags.
For kannels, drums and so on. As a trial I borrowed a leather machine for a while and sewed a couple of piano covers from thermantine. They came out quite decently: fastenings with snaps and clips so that disobedient children could not fiddle with the instrument in the corridor, proper binding, reinforcing tape under the seams and so on. I was genuinely surprised that it went so well at the first attempt. And I rather enjoyed sewing such thick, strong material; it was an experience quite of its own.
After that I got an order for bags for small kannels...
I threw myself into the sewing. I sewed the outer pieces of the bags from various reclaimed materials: denim, an old music school uniform jumper, corduroy; I added reflectors, sequins, rosettes and so on. But then I sadly had to return the borrowed leather machine, and sewing the bags had to wait for "better times".
At the same time I was writing a business plan and applying for start up support. At first I planned to buy a quilting machine. That is a machine with a 3 m wide frame, into which all the layers of a large quilt (backing, wadding, patchwork top) are fixed at once and the whole surface is quilted densely and with a pattern. As far as I know there are currently two such machines in Estonia. I am not talking about industrial machines, of course, but about small production ones.
Well, then I began to doubt whether that was really the best choice. Several months of weighing it up and looking into it, and I changed the direction of my business: a leather machine offers far wider possibilities. It would also be a new challenge, and new is always exciting for me.
I have a business education, I also took part in a two month intensive course in entrepreneurship and put together what I thought was a terribly impressive business plan. I submitted the business plan and the application in January 2013. The deadline for an answer, which was 1.5 months, finally stretched to three months. There was a great deal of waiting and worrying. Then at last the answer came: no. I will not describe my disappointment and indignation here. I challenged the decision and waited for a response for 40 days instead of the promised 10. Again the answer was no.
What else could I do: I took out my business plan again and wrote it twice as long. Clearly the committee still had not grasped how clever and capable I am :-))) But this time I managed to convince them, and a month and a half later, in December 2013, I got a positive answer.
Now I could register the company and order the leather machine and the few small tools listed in the application. Ordering the leather machine went especially well. Until then I had been looking at used industrial machines, whose appearance on the market was a matter of luck and chance. Never mind the price, which was hard to predict. On top of that those machines needed not only industrial power but a compressor as well. And what luck: once the support was granted, machines came onto the market that were a little less powerful but needed no compressed air, and new they cost as much as I had budgeted for a used one. Since I am not going to repair furniture or sew car seats, that offer suited me down to the ground. 🙂
By Christmas the order for the machine had been sent, and now this "miracle creature" has arrived, been assembled, had its oils poured in and its test seams sewn. I am so happy. The pace of work is slow at first, but an order for 15 bags is waiting and sewing them will be interesting and fun. A little complicated too, because I have to work out the whole technology of making such a product myself, find good, workable solutions and striking results. Exciting.
