Welcome to my empire of self-love, inspiration and encouragement.

Where I hope to encourage you in and outside of the craft room, or if you're like me for many years, beyond the kitchen table.

This is Beyond Crafting.

Hey guys, welcome to Beyond Crafting. I am so excited to have Nicole here with me today from Dear handmade loft.

Nicole, I've been looking at your stuff. I love everything that you do. But for my audience, tell me a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do.

Hi everyone, my name is Nicole Stevenson and I'm the CEO and creative director at Dear Handmade Life.

And we produce events, education and community for creatives and passionate small business owners. So we have some in person events. We have a conference every year called Crafcation conference, which is a four day business and makers conference at the beach in Ventura, California, where we have over 200 craft and business classes and wellness classes and social activities parties over the course of just four days.

So that's what is kind of our signature signature event. The weekend, I look forward to the most, but also that's like the most stressful weekend of the year too. It's, it's amazing.

And then we also produce patchwork show, which is an in person craft festival. So if you aren't familiar with it, you can kind of think of it as at sea come to life with food trucks and music, although not during COVID, we haven't had to be able to have food trucks and music, but eventually we'll get back to it being more of a festival celebrating handmade and community.

And then we have a podcast and a blog where we share a lot of resources for creativity and for small businesses in the creative field and we have a what else a shop.

So we have an online shop featuring t-shirts and pins with maker anthems on them, like make all the things and stay crafty and our newest thing that we're doing right now, we're right in the middle of it in the summer is our camp Dear Handmade life, which is a six week summer camp themed at home.

Experience for creatives in goal setting and then we also have craft business and wellness classes too.

You had me at beach.

I didn't need to say any of that other stuff is just like, OK, beach.

Yeah, beach and crafts. I'm totally in. So what do you think the mission behind Dear Handmade life is?

Well, when it started out, we just were kind of creating what didn't exist, what we wished was existing. So we weren't really thinking we didn't have a mission in mind. It wasn't like we started a business and we're like, this is the business we're going to start and the mission is going to be this, but as it's evolved over time, I feel like the mission is sort of a living breathing thing.

So it definitely has changed over time, but right now I feel like the mission is to help creatives live a more joyful and intentional life.

So whether that means that they're working full time at a job and then being creative in their free time or whether it means doing a part time job and part time, you know, their own, their own thing or going full force.

I don't think that it's the answer for everyone to turn their crafting into their career and I think it seems sometimes more rose colored, you know, then it then it really is.

So what I would what I like to help people do is to look at their lives as their lives are then with an I have gratitude. So looking and seeing, hey, what is going right right now.

What's good right now, which pretty much we all have something good, even in the midst of, you know, for me in the midst of like COVID last year of COVID and I was in postpartum depression and like my business, which was all in person events was not doing well, even then I had things to be grateful for.

So looking at your life through a lens of gratitude, but also looking at it through a lens of growth.

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