A Room of One's Own // Episode 117 // Taking Back Friday // a fibre arts vlog

hey guys i want to share with you this video that has been more than a year in the making and uh we can chat more after this story [Music] hey guys so i have some great news i'm standing here in our new studio and we just got the okay from the building inspector to say that we are okay to begin building so yeah he's approved our building permit we're gonna get ready to do some renovations but before we do any of that i thought what i would do is take you on a little bit of a tour and give you sort of a look at what it looks like before everything happens in here so when you walk in the front door what is going to be here is this area is going to be our new showroom retail space this counter over here is going to be gone and there's actually two entrances to this place so this one will be for the team and you can see it's kind of a it's kind of a bigger space than we're used to and we're very excited we're going to have a lunchroom in here this is all gonna be changed and it will hopefully look a lot different when we're finally done with it but this whole space is gonna be the lunchroom so coming out of the kitchen and lunchroom we have more space this is going to be dark here this space will eventually be the room where we're making party of five kits and things like that that's all going to happen in here and this is the space for the dye studio right now there's just one sink there but this whole area is going to get built out that'll be an office for hubert and charlotte that is going to be our die production area now this spot that i want to share with you this is going to be the space where the loom is going to go this is going to be uh a fiber arts studio space so you can see the space where it marked off on the uh on the ground there that's going to be where the loom is going to sit i think and then we're just figuring out where the shelves and where things are going to go this space here this is going to be the table where we'll do uh filming courses and things like that so that's all going on in here you can see i've already brought some some of the harrisville yarn here to hang out and this is going to be my little office space where i'm hopefully going to be doing all of the live office hours from this room here so i wanted to show you guys this space before anything happens to it you can tell that there's a big echo in here there's a big buzz from the electrical room in here the space is bigger than the spaces that we've ever worked in i mean i started everything at a dining room table and then i moved into my basement and then i moved into a space outside my house that was 700 square feet and that seemed like it was massive it seemed like a massive undertaking and now years and years and years later we've come to this place where um we're gonna build something new in here we're gonna build something amazing in here and i have been wanting to record this particular episode for probably a year now more than a year now it's been such a long time in the works and it's not something that i was able to share with anybody in great detail and so i'm finally finally so excited to be able to tell you about what this is and what it's going to be i think it was about a year and a half ago almost that i put out a video talking about how things take a very very very very long time and i was talking about a number of things that were going on in my life for sweet georgia at the time and one of those things was building this place and so i'm very excited to finally be able to share with you what's been going on so if you have known us if you visit us at sweet georgia for any any time in the past couple of years you'll know that our we ran out of space we just completely ran out of space i um i over the past couple of years as we've tried to grow what we're doing at the school of sweet georgia and begin up you filming classes we filmed class with katrina you know filming classes with rachel all these kinds of things trying to find where is the right place to film these courses how is it going to be efficient how is it going to be effective um when we filmed with katrina we wanted to film it at the studio and be surrounded by color and all sorts of things like that we were trying to do too many things all at the same time in the same space and so what we really needed was a larger space so for a long time now i've been looking looking looking for another place for us to move to in in in vancouver so after all of these years of trying to find a place for sweet georgia to move to i mean we have been in our current space for about seven years now and uh it was time to make a move to find something else that fits the way we do our work now because we don't just dye yarn but we also make courses and we make content and we're doing lots of other things that require different kinds of space and um so i had been looking for a very very long time now it came up at the beginning of june last year this is like over a year ago it came up that one of the opportunities that i have been waiting for for my whole life it seems like came up and that was that there were openings at granville island so if you've never been to vancouver you might not know what grandma island is but granville island is an incredibly special place in vancouver it's it's this patch of land underneath the granville street bridge that's very central in the middle of vancouver and it's designated for arts and culture so it has a public market that is designated to food local food it's like artisan food production just amazing things are happening there um there's space that is uh subsidized for artists and makers and printmakers and designers and leather workers and apron makers and basket makers and broom makers like it's very specific very niche things of course they have ceramics and textile arts they have fiber art studios down there and so it has been a long time dream for me to join that community that art community at granville island for those of you guys who have maybe not heard this part of my story i basically i was born in vancouver and then when i was two my parents moved us to toronto and when they moved to toronto my dad he was basically a graduate student so he studied at ubc he did a graduate program at ubc and then he went to toronto to do another graduate program after that program he worked in museology at the royal ontario museum in toronto in his heart what he really wanted to do was to be a painter to be an artist and to be printmaker and so he moved us back from toronto to vancouver in um when i was in grade seven basically the end of when i was in grade seven and he moved back from toronto to vancouver specifically for the reason that he was going to become an artist he was leaving that career that sort of regular day job kind of career to do this career which was to be a full-time full-fledged practicing artist and the very first thing that he did when he came back to vancouver was to join the malice pina printmaker society at grandma island so starting from when i was in grade 7 we'd be going down to granville island you know and seeing the the culture that is there seeing that creative spirit that vibe down there is very innovative it's very i think it very much influenced a lot of my decision making and why i chose to leave also my career and my day jobs and previous lives in order to do this work here it's kind of a big step to say i'm going to leave that other normal life and create something from scratch for myself that is in a creative art that people may or may not understand or yeah know anything about i felt very romantic about the idea that i could also end up at ramble island and that sweet georgia could also end up at grandpa island and that we would become part of this creative maker community that's down there and so i dove in head first into this process of trying to apply for this basic grandma island so just because um space comes up for lease at granville island doesn't mean that you can just get it you actually have to compete to get it and so i had spent a month writing a proposal creating budgets doing financials projecting three years and five years down the line what things were going to happen i had to figure out space plans i hired designers to do measurements to do floor plans to do construction diagrams of how this thing was going to be built what we were going to use the space for uh figuring out you know what our schedule was going to be when we were going to be open when we were going to host events when we were going to host knit nights what kind of events we would host how we were going to market it how we were going to get this out to the world i spent probably about a month and a half two months full time working on this proposal and my whole team knows like i just i spent all my time working on this proposal to try to get to grandma island so finally you know i put together my proposal i had my floor plans i created this whole kit i had to create a brand book about sweet georgia what sweet georgia is like and what it's about what we stand for what we believe in what we value i prepared like a box of all of our samples of samples of patterns that we've done samples of the book that i published just everything into this massive proposal kit that i then delivered by hand to grandma island and um i actually filmed a video on the day that i was going to drop off the package because it was such a monumental milestone of the process to have finished this package and i was going to go deliver it by hand to the people who are going to make a decision about my life for the next five to 10 years hey guys i just wanted to record a quick little video here to capture this moment of what is actually happening i hope that this is a video that i'm going to be able to share with you guys in the future to share with you guys good news so the proposal goes into them and then it takes them months to deliberate on this and uh it's not just one decision maker and it's not just one decision-making moment so it's basically a group of people first go through all the proposals and they do a short list and then another larger group of people look at all the shortlisted applications and then they go through and they do another short list and then another larger group of people looks again at all of the shortlisted people and then pulls out an even smaller short list of people to come and do presentations and so i was delighted after months and months and months of this entire process hearing that we had been selected to do a presentation to grandma island and so of course i began working on the presentation and waiting to find out when the date of the presentation was going to be and of course the date of the presentation was on a day that i was still scheduled to be in hawaii with my family taking my parents to hawaii for the first time to celebrate my mom's birthday and um so i remember distinctly having to leave hawaii leave my family leave my parents leave my husband in hawaii two days and then i came home two days early to prepare for and do the actual presentation to grandma island and i remember leaving it was very hard to leave the kids were having such a good time it's like golden hour at the beach it's quite it's quite amazing and to have to leave to go to the airport just wondering about all of the sacrifices that i needed to make in order to make this business idea happen and asking myself whether or not it was worth it and so it was probably the beginning or middle of december when we finally heard back from the committee at granville island that we came in second i took a couple days to be sad i will admit that after spending so much time and so much focus and so much energy on this one thing that i thought that i wanted so badly it was a bit of a it was a bit of a let down i just thought that i wanted it so bad but in that whole experience of being at home by myself rehearsing my presentation i was reading through the words of my presentation and i realized that the most important thing about this entire application process was not getting the space at grandpa island it was about going through the application process it was about carving out that time so specifically to work on this one thing that i felt so strongly about to carve out that time and to dedicate that time just for soul searching just for envisioning just for meditating just for thinking and planning that was so important if i had not had the opportunity of grandma island staring me in the face i would have just continued on as i do doing things and doing things and doing things and not really having the time or the space to stop and think about all of the other things that i want five or ten years down the line and so i realized while i was practicing the presentation that the most important part of this entire process was the process itself and that i'd already gotten the gain that i needed to get out of this entire process and it's it's so funny that while i was waiting for the verdict from grandma island i also was still online still looking for other spaces to to to move into still looking to see what other space is available and um i saw this space here and this is where we are now and as it turns out the space is more than double the space that we would have had if we were on grandma island it is already built out in a way that will function perfectly for all of those functions that we want the studio to be we want it to be a space for teaching where we're doing the education whether it's online education or in-person education we want it to be a place where we can still continue to do our production dying and we want it to be a space where we can sort of welcome and host our community here people who are local knitters who want to come here and hang out and have knit nights and have events and anybody who's traveling from out of town to come and visit us all of that stuff we want to be able to do all of those things in this space here and so i'm very excited that we're finally gonna get started so as you can see that is basically what was happening at the beginning of july with the studio we had signed the lease in january we started applying for a building permit in february after five months we finally got the building permit approved in july and now it's august and we're in the middle of construction so there's a lot of renovations happening behind the scenes and lots of things are going to be happening at the studio build and i hope to be able to share with you guys the final look um in probably a couple of weeks a couple of months probably it'll probably be middle of this fall before i'm able to actually share with you what it looks like completed so in the meantime while we wait for that there's a bunch of other things that are happening at the studio no doubt you know that our mcal our mystery long is going to be starting very very shortly it's going to be starting september 1st that's when the first clue drops and you can get those kits now available on our shop we also recently just this past week released our new seasonal collection so our new fall or we call it autumn now autumn with sweet georgia all the patterns are available new colors are available new fade sets are available lots of new things are available on the shop and the one last update that i want to give you guys is that if you have been waiting for sweet georgia's advent calendar to return pre-orders for that will begin very very shortly so what you'll want to do is if you would like to get an advent calendar this year you want to make sure that you are on our email newsletter list make sure that our emails don't go to spam and uh hint wink wink it is going to be happening in the next couple of weeks that pre-order announcement is going to be happening and we have a limited number as always we don't specify a time uh for the update because it crashes our servers and that's no good for anybody so uh what we're gonna do is it will get announced in one of our email newsletters so you wanna make sure that you are on the list for that so that is it for today i hope you guys like this slightly different video it's been a long time in the making and i'm very excited to finally be able to share it with you if you like this video please hit the like button and if you would like to see more updates from us and what we're doing and what we're building at the studio please feel free to subscribe and we come here almost every friday to share a new video about what's going on at sweet georgia thank you so much for being here and i will see you in the next one all right bye for now this is gonna be another everyone office okay okay okay one can be done one can be that one can be that one can be that one can be closets put all of your creations you

Channel: SweetGeorgia

Views: 8,572

Keywords: sweetgeorgia yarns, knitting podcast, knitting vlog, knitting podcasts on youtube, hand-dyed yarn, felicia lo, sweet georgia yarns, knitting yarn, knitting podcasts canada, sweet georgia podcast, hand-dyed yarns, school of sweetgeorgia, hand dyed yarn, fibre arts, knitting vlogs, knitting blog, fibre arts vlog, sweet georgia yarn youtube, yarn stash, hand dyed yarn techniques, craft room, fibre arts studio, weaving studio, renovations, diy

Id: 97ExuUXtJAk

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020