Today I’m delighted to host a guest blog post by The Mercerie’s brilliant lifestyle photographer Boo Marshall;
I’ve watched the creation of The Mercerie grow from the seed of an idea to a successful and vibrant creative company. As someone who has been lucky enough to be asked to photograph the major seasonal collections, I’ve been there, witnessing the birth of a design idea – something simple like colour choices wound round card, or some crochet motifs still on the hook, or a half knitted bag. Then later, much later, I see the finished samples, and I gasp – every time – with delight.
For those of us who love wool, who adore colour and whose fingers have a physical yearning to make, The Mercerie’s designer, Sue, has managed to meet and satisfy our creative needs. The need within us to create is almost as strong as the need to breathe. Who has not whipped open their new package to reveal their choice of wools and colour palatte and not sighed with happiness? Although the process of creation can be fraught with anxiety, or frustration, the satisfaction of completion makes us forgot those moments of frogging or the doubt that appeared in the night over our choice of colour. Rather like the birth of a new baby, the arrival of our completed project is worth every day of angst, sickness or even pain.
But the final result doesn’t just delight because it is complete; rather, it invites you to continue your journey – because during this one, you may have learnt a new technique, or perfected an old one, or because you want to try it again with different colours. And that I think is the key to successful design – that it pushes you on, again, into a new part of a continuing journey.
Last year, engrossed with the art of creating, I set up a new business with a fellow photographer, Jo. Both of us had experienced purposeful creation of aspects of ourselves, our personal and our business lives – and decided to share our experiences in Create The Moment. We recognised that within a vast majority of women, we shared a feeling that we’d lost control of aspects of our lives, even of our characters – in our ability to make choices and to decide what we wanted and how we wanted to live in our futures.
After running workshops, we adapted our ideas into an online 6 week course, showing how it is possible to return to your past to choose what you want to stay, and how to use the amazing strength we all have, to choose our future.
Having spent weeks writing and editing the course documents, I suddenly saw how the process it invites you to go through, is similar to the process of creating. It has all the initial excitement that is familiar in the new start of any creative project. There are many, many moments in it that will bring you close to tears – but throughout it, there is always hope – and finally, the end promises not just completion – but a brand new start. And therein lies the real comparison to creating – that an end is just another start, to a phase in another journey.
Readers and newsletter subscribers of The Mercerie have a special code allowing them 20% off the full price of the Create Your Vision online course. Use code Mercerie20 when you book using this link. Next course starts 1st June 2016.
Boo Marshall is a photographer and film maker. (Eliza Boo Photography and Dynamic Dog Productions). She is also co founder of Create The Moment with Johanna Garlike, photographer at Summer Love Photography.
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