Where have my babies gone?

Are you a Mum in the thick of it? Wondering what you have gotten yourself into becoming a parent..... feeling overstimulated and that the feeling of being constantly needed is never going to end?

Well they say the days are long and the years are short, and that is certainly true!!

Welcome to my very first blog, my name is Michelle Wilson, the Creator and Owner of Muffy Duck Designs. I design PDF Sewing Patterns for baby accessories. 

Well, the years have certainly flown. My son is 9 now and my daughter is 7. I released my first pattern 6 months after my daughter was born, the Pram Caddy. And let me reassure all you Mum's who are under the pump, that it does get easier..... in some ways ha ha. But now as I see my children growing quickly into mini adults, the sadness kicks in. I wish I could have enjoyed the journey more. 

So hang in there and remember, it won't always be like this. You are in the thick of it, and you've got this. 

How does one even get into designing sewing patterns? Well, when my son was born, I had a friend who had a sewing business making cloth nappies. I asked her if she could make me a few things, which she did, but then I remembered about my sewing machine buried in the shed which I had kept from high school and bought over from New Zealand in 2007, at 21 years old.

From there, I fell down the Pinterest rabbit hole. I dug out my sewing machine, rifled through my scraps of fabric that Mum had sent me over the years and made a pair of fabric shoes and some bibs for my son. I was hooked!!!!! I took sewing as a subject in high school and ended up getting top of the class. My Mum was also keen sewer and would make my ball dresses, swimming togs etc. 

I eventually started a business called Muffy Duck Baby Accessories (Muffy Duck was my nickname from my Dad) sewing custom made items for babies. Then one day, I stumbled upon a blog post of two ladies telling their story of how they sewed items and had a market stall for years and never made a great deal of money. Then one day they did an online course from https://patternworkshop.com/ turned some of their patterns they had drawn onto paper into a PDF version and sold them on Etsy.

By this time in my business, I had fallen into making pram liners but couldn't find a sewing pattern I liked. I wanted my liners to fit well and not fall down. I had countless prams from clients in my small house, to be measured and have custom patterns drawn up. The Pattern Workshop course instructs on how to design patterns for clothes, but I used the concept of drawing shapes in Adobe Illustrator to draw my pram liner shapes. I then used Adobe InDesign to create in depth and informative instructions on how how to make the liner itself.

The windows computer I had at the time was not capable of running the Adobe software so I scraped together all the money I had to buy an Apple Mac laptop for $2,200. To my amazement, I made all that money back within the first 48 hours of releasing my very first pattern, the Pram Caddy.

I have since gone on to design and release 67 patterns that include pram liners, shopping trolley liners, cot rail protectors, bags, and baby wearing accessories. I have had over 13,000 sales in 7 years and this little side hustle has kept my head above water since my marriage break down, becoming a single parent and divorced.

The first ever pram liner design for my Baby Jogger City Select, made from some random fabric I had in a box. 

https://muffyduckdesigns.com/products/baby-jogger-city-select-city-select-lux-pram-liner-stroller-liner-pdf-sewing-pattern-stroller-accessories-stroller-pad