We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Callie Hawley. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Callie below.
Callie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?
In the early 2000s, “bead lizards” were all the rage. They dangled off of the backpacks of my classmates, and I spent hours with my friends meticulously threading plastic beads onto lanyard string to make every color combination we could dream up. At the time, the other kids in my neighborhood were standing up lemonade and hot chocolate stands. I had no passion for slinging beverages to passing cars but an immense enthusiasm for making these little bead animals. So I stood up a 6-foot folding table in our front yard, colored a poster board sign, and started to sell my little creations. While clearly not a lucrative endeavor, I’d say that was the first dollar I ever earned as a creative. In fact, it may have been just a single dollar.
The real money came in in adulthood, but not when I first started out with my business. I had tremendous support from friends and family that funded my trips to the craft store, but it wasn’t until I started to focus my efforts on my designs rather than my finished products that I began to grow significantly.
I still remember my first pattern sale. I had posted a video to my TikTok (at the time, about 300 followers) with a pillow that I had made using my first-ever pattern. Thanks to the algorithmic gods, that video started to take off. Next thing I knew, “cha-ching”, a notification popped up from my Etsy that I had sold a pattern. And then another. And another. Almost 4 years, and 11,000 pattern sales later, I still get a little jolt of joy every time I see another notification.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I have been crafty and creative my entire life. My mom tells me it’s in my blood and that I come from a long line of creative women. Growing up, I remember my mom always being artistic, taking over (ahem, helping us) with our school projects, being the creative mind behind things like my brother’s marching band backdrops and my Halloween costumes. She taught me to crochet when I was 5, and I made my first-ever scarf.
As I got older, I took many trips to the craft store where I would get the supplies to make the “next big thing.” Woven potholders? Yep. Bead lizards? You bet. Friendship bracelets? By the hundreds.
I picked crochet up on and off for my entire life and revisited it seriously in the mid-2000s. I also got into embroidery and cross-stitch, selling hoops with rap lyrics or pop culture references on them. Those did well, but the constant need to create to fill inventory started to pull some of the joy out of what I was doing. I was also, at the time, diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, and my health started to decline, making it even harder to create at a sustainable level.
Fast forward to the summer of 2020. My first kiddo was just about 18 months old, I had just had a major surgery to help with my disease, we were in the middle of a pandemic, and I needed to do something to ground me and let me feel creative again. I picked back up my crochet hook and made some throw pillows for our living room. And then I decided to make a pillow with an expletive on it for a friend’s housewarming. The response to that was so great, that I thought, “Why not turn this into a pattern for others to make?” And so, my first crochet pattern was born. One viral video later, I had an audience that seemly craved content and patterns like that.
So, I made my second pattern. And a third… In my first year releasing patterns, I released 48 new pillow designs. As of this writing, I’ve sold over 11,000 patterns, and continue to add more to the portfolio. My greatest joy is in inspiring a younger generation of people to learn to crochet, or for those seasoned crocheters to get their “crojo” back.
When I’m not crocheting (or knitting, or sewing, or felting), I am working full-time for my day job in marketing, and being a mom to 2 amazing kiddos & dog, a wife to the love of my life, and hanging out with my friends and family.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding thing about being an artist, especially an artist who sells patterns, is watching others successfully make something because of the thing you put out into the world. It goes without saying that inspiring people is overwhelmingly rewarding, but more than that, showing someone that they can create with their own two hands is so empowering for both me and them.
Especially in the dawn of AI, handmade is more important than ever. We get to use our imagination and create whatever our brains want us to.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
We have all been trained to get what we want quickly… sometimes by same-day shipping. And we want it cheap.
In today’s economy, it is so hard to ask anyone to spend money on something discretionary. And handmade goods in any capacity are and should continue to be, priced at a premium. They require materials, skill, and time, and deserve compensation for those efforts.
But asking someone to buy an original piece of art for 10x the price of a print, or to purchase a handmade sweater when they could get it at Target for far less is hard. If your budget doesn’t allow you to financially support artists and creatives, THAT’S OK! There are so many other ways you can support that are F-R-E-E. The simplest:
1. Support artists and creatives on social media. Often times, artists and creatives are doing their own marketing, which means they are running their own social media, on top of running their business, doing admin tasks, and of course, creating. Giving them a follow, sharing their work, hyping them up, all are huge ways you can support.
2. Supporting the “shop small” movement, especially during the holiday timeframe. Artists and creatives struggle to compete with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, because there is just no feasible way to reduce their prices so much to show up next to big-box stores. Remind friends and family to shop small for the holidays, or show them pieces out there that may be great for a loved one.
Contact Info:
- Website: morningcrafter.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_morningcrafter/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/morningcrafter
- Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@the_morningcrafter