Hello and welcome to Wildflower Press

Welcome! I thought I’d kick off my blog by telling you a bit about my self. My name is Courtney and I am a wife, sister, daughter, Mum of one toddler, dog Mum to Angus, embroiderer, and social worker living in the little peace of paradise we call home, Yeppoon.

I have a little hobby side hustle called “wildflower collective” that sells hand embroidered clothes and homewares with floral, wording and wildlife designs among my repertoire. Embroidery wasn’t my first foray into the creative world. I was initially inspired to create tees for my toddler as I found it difficult to find boys clothes that weren’t generic or ridiculously expensive with nothing in between. I tried a few different mediums, experimenting with hand dyeing and screen printing but found it laborious and I just wasn’t very good at it and the shirts looked terrible! My poor son has quite a large collection of half finished shirts in various shades of pinky/brown with screen printed designs that you’re not sure if it’s a palm tree or an unidentifiable animal. I would regularly hold up my designs, including some of my early embroidered work to my husband and ask what he could see. He did his best to not hurt my feelings but when he would start with “umm... is it a...”, I knew it was a shirt for the daycare pile. I eventually had a play with embroidered designs and I now feel like I found my passion. I find it very therapeutic, mindful and calming to sit and stitch (when I get time with a active toddler, which is few and far between I must add). My beautiful and talented Mum taught my sister and I to stitch at a young age and her Mum (my Grandma) did the same. My Grandma was a seamstress with a successful dress making business in Yeppoon in the 1940s (keep an eye out for a post about this in the near future). Mum took us to lessons at the local embroidery guild when we were a little bit older but I never really picked it back up again until recently. I am loving doing baby, kids and adults clothes and homewares, doing the occasional market and Etsy sale. You can check out my Etsy store here: https://etsy.me/2T8LI5e I decided to venture into the blog world and pen “Wildflower Press” after going to the Capricorn Coast Writers Festival and heard from industry professionals such as authors, editors and copywriters. I was so inspired and energised by the literary world, also partly due to binge watching the Stan series “Younger” which is a look into the world of a busy successful publishing company in New York City. I’ve always loved words, loved the sounds of words, meanings behind them and how their spelt. I recently realised this was a trait that runs in my family when I was having a conversation with my 92 year old Grandma, an avid reader who could average reading a book a day if given the chance, and a lovely family friend who hails from Switzerland. We were discussing Grandma’s dressing table and our friend could only think of the French word “la coifeusse” and my Grandma said she wanted to know how it was spelt so she could visualise it in her mind. This is something that I would usually do as well, to find out how a new word is spelt and write it down so I could visualise it!

This is turning out to be a very lengthy first post so I’ll sign off there! Thanks for tuning in.

Court x