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

Hi Angela, thanks for joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

A risk I took was to invite local business owners over my home to learn a skill (needle felting) and made clear my intention of wanting to teach this skill at their establishments. It was a risk because I had spent my career in the corporate setting and had never taught a fiber arts class professionally. I didn’t know what their reaction would be, if they’d like it, let alone want me to teach it at their establishment.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Hi! Angela here! I am super appreciative of hearing others stories and learning from community so happy to be invited to share mine.

I was raised by a highly creative family. My mom was an illustrator, puppet maker, doodler, bulletin board maker extroideraire, all of which she did while working full time as a teacher. She incorporated all these things into her life, never being compensated for her artistic products.

Mom was raised by a seamstress. I was always around people making and creating, from the ladies in my life, including an artistic sister to my Dad who dabbled in inventions, typically with recycled parts, while earning a living as a social worker.

I was taught that a steady paycheck was valuable and seeing how my family did not earn a living with their more artistic ventures, I got a degree in HR and wound up being a trainer in a corporate setting for 30 years. The last team I worked with was unilaterally cut and I was 50, going through a divorce and had just lost my mom. I decided to take a break from corporate life and re-group.

I have dabbled in sewing, knitting and other fiber arts as a hobby for years and my friends who had been gifted my hand knits started having holes to be mended. I came across an easy way to mend wool items with needle felting and invited friends over to fix their garments and woolen accessories. They loved it. I decided to invite a friend/business owner over to try it with the intention to teach and her and her husbands establishment.(see risk taken above.) It was a success. She loved it, and I wound up teaching at this local business which runs creative workshops. They saw I could teach (thank you 30 years experience) and asked me why else I could teach. It went from there. I am now teaching a variety of textile classes, mainly focusing on sustainability (so lots of mending and adoring what you already have) and slowing down (slow stitching including Sashiko and embroidery) all over the Detroit Metropolitan area and Canada. I am looking to expand my reach and have recently invested in hardware that would allow me to better teach on-line classes but want to create a website to showcase my offerings but have been hung up on creating a business name and and creating a website. One step at a time, right?

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Growing my clientele has been mainly word of mouth and adjusting topics to meet the needs and skill level of my participants. For example, I had been teaching new sewists a project that lent itself to silky fabric (a schunchie, as I know you were wondering) and I saw this was difficult for beginners to work with silky (read: slippery) fabric so I asked participants what kind of other project they’d like to learn and they said “a bag!” I switched it up to an easy reversible bag. I also noticed it was taking too long to pick and cut out fabric so now I prepare the material so we can concentrate on sewing. My last gig in a corporate setting was teaching Human Centered Design so that comes in handy to know how to tailor classes to meet the needs of the humans I am teaching.

Something that I find really effective is offering a class for free to friends. This lets you prototype. Low stakes experiments where you can garner feedback and adjust/pivot, anticipate questions, etc. it also helps me garner samples, photos and recommendations to help market to future, paying customers. I am still in my infancy and continue to work on this.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Resilience has shown up for me in just going for it. I felt pretty defeated in losing my job and the ending of a life (Mom’s death) and a relationship but I doubled down on the thing that brought me joy (creating, and being in community) and went for it. I knew I was not the eminent sewist, mender, needle felter, but I knew I was a good teacher, and people seemed to really like to be together when they were trying something new. It gives them conference and inspiration and the camaraderie that I think we are all craving. What has worked for me is following my spark. What gives me joy is empowering people to learn new skills and using that gift to share with others keeps me going.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @angelalynn114 and Ravelry