Introducing Myself

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Hi!  I'm a tie-dye artist in Jacksonville, Florida (USA).  My daughter and I took a workshop with our favorite tie-dye guy in May of 2006.  We had admired his work for years and I had just run screaming (OK, not literally, but I wanted to) from a cubicle job and was thinking about what to do next.  We enjoyed the workshop and my daughter showed a real talent for tying, so we decided to try our hands at a little business.  She went and spent a lot more time with the tie-dye guy, learning the different folds.  I have the eye for color, so I do most of the dyeing.  Our plan was to start on a shoestring and bootstrap the business, doing small shows and growing slowly, while continuing to learn the craft.  That all changed last October, when our wonderful tie-dye mentor passed away suddenly, and we were asked to take over as tie-dye vendors at what had always been his biggest event of the year.  We didn't know this was going to happen when my daughter decided 2008 would be a good year to have a baby, so we ended up trying to prepare for and participate in a huge festival with a very small baby in tow.

The festival was Memorial Day weekend and somehow (with a lot of help from family and friends) we survived.  Now we're trying to breathe and re-group, and get back to doing tie-dye only full-time, instead of 12 to 14 hours a day!  It's nice to have a little money in the bank, instead of a looming Master Card bill and a vague hope that we'll sell enough tie-dye to cover it.

We miss our mentor, but we're grateful for the knowledge he generously shared with us.  He was an absolute original and we will never fill his shoes, but we hope to follow in his footsteps.


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What a neat opportunity to have a "mentor" to learn from and such
a quality one. Nice you can carry on his skills.

I'd love to sell tie dye in a warmer and dryer climate......
It has been sooooo wet up here in Washington this year.

Jo

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Hi, Jo!  Thanks for your reply.

Well, it's definitely warm here -- which means if we want to sell tie-dye in the summer, we have to head north.  It's too hot to have outdoor festivals in Florida in the summer.  We work outdoors (my carport is our studio), too, so the heat can be pretty oppressive.  Spring and Fall are the good tie-dye seasons here, in North Florida.  South Florida has a lot going on in winter, but we don't travel that far right now because of the baby.

Wet weather is the worst, isn't it? Our first day at our last festival, it rained all morning.  All you can do is just hunker down and hope it clears.  I've returned from festivals and had to throw all our stock in the dryer.  Somehow, that's never my daughter's job...