We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Madeline Meehan. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Madeline below.

Madeline, appreciate you joining us today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I definitely wish I had started my creative career sooner. I have long been what I like to describe as an obsessive accruer of hobbies. I didn’t realize until I was in my late 20s that craftsperson could be a job in modern times. That’s the time period when I started teaching craft classes around Austin and shortly thereafter opened an Etsy shop and then a few years later started selling things I had made at craft markets and in a couple of stores around Austin. There’s an enormous amount of effort and time that has to go into making any business venture successful and I wish I had started that process earlier – or that I could just time travel and tell my younger self some things. Like the, seemingly very obvious, fact that being paid in exposure is actually just not being paid. And that there are a lot of fairly boring but absolutely crucial parts of running a business like learning how to do accounting and make sure that certain events are actually worth the money it costs to participate in them.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

As I mentioned earlier, I have always been an obsessive accruer of hobbies. I learned to knit in middle school and have taken a lot of different art classes. But once I started to embroider it was just a completely different feeling. I wasn’t immediately good at it – something I always try to remind people in my classes is that the first one of anything you make is the worst one but it’s the only way to get better – but it was just so calming. It does feel sort of meditative to me as an activity. I have since also begun learning how to sew clothes and accessories with my sewing machine and can now make a completely custom item from start to finish which I just love.

Some of my favorite things I have been able to do is make embroidered baby blankets and custom jackets for people. It’s just so nice to be able to see those items in continuous use for several years and sometimes people will send me pictures to update how the items and embroidery are holding up once the item is fully worn in and those updates just make me feel so proud.

I do hand embroider everything I sell. When I have machine sewn an item I’ll also include that information because that means it’s ethically produced in Austin. Whether I’ve made the item fully from scratch or not I always try to find second hand fabric for both environmental reasons and also because I think it makes the items so much more unique.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I had to pivot at the same time that pretty much everyone in the whole world did – when the pandemic came. I went from selling at markets pretty regularly and teaching in person classes around town to…well for a little while, nothing. Then I figured out a camera setup so I could teach classes virtually and get students the supplies delivered instead of in person. And I switched to a much more online version of selling. I’ve had to get a lot better at taking pictures of the things I’ve made and that’s been great just in general. There are so many things I made before the pandemic where I don’t have any pictures at all of the finished product or I only have one and it’s really dimly lit so not useful at all for trying to make more that look similarly or for promotional images at all.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I mean, I’d like to think I could really thrive in a barter economy or a cooperative society where everyone is working together so it’s fine if sitting down to knit a blanket takes one person an entire week because hey then there’s a blanket. (Knitting remains my absolute slowest skill so maybe other people could do that a lot faster.) But from a more practical standpoint, a change that everyone can make is just to expect to pay people what their time cost. Don’t think that the supplies cost x dollars so the finished item should also be x dollars. So much time and skill goes into making crafts and I wish that was better valued. Also never (never never) offer to pay someone in exposure. No matter how many followers you have, there’s no guarantee that any of them will buy the thing and you are just asking someone to do their job for free. Not only not valuing their time and skill but not even valuing the cost of materials.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @SnarkilyAdorable
• Facebook: SnarkilyAdorable
• Other: Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/SnarkilyAdorableCo?ref=profile_header