A Valentines Day Request

Happy Valentines Day to all of you who may be celebrating with your loved ones .. and especially good luck to any of you who may be taking the opportunity to propose this year!

As many of you, who have been reading my blog for a while may know, I don't go out of my way to celebrate Valentines Day. Unfortunately it is also the anniversary of the passing away of my much loved Dad .. who left us unfortunately 9 years ago today.
Rather than not publish a blog post at all, however, I generally take this opportunity to help out and request that any of you who feel like you wish to give as well as receive this Valentines consider donating to Leukaemia Research.
This horrible disease is what took my Dad from us and is always in need of funds so one day we may find a cure.

To donate to the Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research charity you can visit https://leukaemialymphomaresearch.org.uk/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=1 and just give as much as you can :)

Hopefully this blog post hasn't put too much of a downer on your Valentines Day and you'll look forward to joining me on Monday for the very exciting launch of my Spring Collections of Wedding Stationery & Greetings Cards :)

Thank you.

Nikki x

A Personal Post : Being Self Employed Sucks ...

... but only sometimes.
I love being self-employed! It is by far the best thing I have ever done. I was never very good at working for someone else .. I'm fair too opinionated and prone to working when I'm at my most productive rather than when someone tells me to!
Working for yourself is fantastic most of the time ... it does give an enormous sense of achievement and there are times when something comes up and you can just go ... yes I'll give myself time off to do that!

However I have to say the last few months for me and the world of Self-Employment have been a struggle. One of the toughest things about being self-employed and running your own business is that if you are feeling sick then you can't just ring in and get someone else to cover. You work through it. Your clients have put their faith in you to produce their wedding stationery and its not their fault that you would rather be bundled up under the duvet with a lemsip!
Unfortunately for the last four months I've felt like I've got a permanent cold. The doctor has said I've got allergic rhinitis .. basically permanent hayfever, and to be honest that's not that big a deal ... if it had gone on for just a few weeks ... but after four months of feeling like this it really starts to wear you down.

I still love being self employed though and I love creating couples wedding stationery, no matter how terrible I'm feeling .. so this is definitely not a doom and gloom, looking for sympathy post. I just felt like sharing because often that really helps ... and to be honest I've been trying to put a brave face on it because quite frankly friends and family don't want to be constantly hearing that you feel like crap!

Anyway I have decided because of this that this year I am going to give myself a proper Christmas holiday and am taking a full two weeks off ... madness I know :)
I am determined to have a proper relaxing time .. even though I'll be cooking like mad as we've got 8 people for Christmas. But to be honest I love cooking and this will be relaxing for me. Hopefully having a bit of down time will help me feel better and at least less run down as we approach new year.
I'm going to schedule blog posts and tweets but I'm determined not to be constantly on Social Media during this time.

I don't want to wallow in self pity though! To end on a positive note this week has been great in many ways! Firstly I made one of my best friends Save the Date Cards which I'm very excited for her to receive! I also had a lovely weekend with my other half shopping in Exeter Christmas Market and spent Sunday putting up my Christmas Tree ... which is possibly my favourite thing to do all year!
Doing fun stuff like this definitely makes me feel less like spending the day under the duvet and definitely helps me feel better :)

A Personal Project - A Magical Forest Painting

Firstly a bit of an apology for the lack of blog post yesterday. Its been a tough week here at Knots & Kisses. I've been making lots of decisions for the future and am delighted to announce that there will be an updated version of the website, with new wedding stationery ranges and lots of other new goodies launching at the end of September / beginning of October!
I'm really excited about it :)

On another subject, I've mentioned before that I've been working on a bit of a personal project over the last few months and have been spending any odd time off I can grab to work on a painting for my gorgeous 4 year old niece's bedroom.
I managed to get a couple of hours in to work on it this week and it's finally at a stage where I wanted to share with you how it's coming along.
Its so nice to get some time to paint every now and again ... I think it keeps me creative and inspired.

Anyway the picture is a Magical Forest theme .. and I promised my niece a gingerbread house and lots of fairies and gnomes :)

A Personal Plea For Professionalism!

Good morning all! Welcome to another week on the Knots & Kisses blog ... this week I'm looking forward to working on an order of my Very British Wedding Range of Wedding Stationery and also some tropical themed pocketfold invitations.

Today I wanted to share with you one of the bespoke stationery designs I worked on for a lovely couple recently. However, before I get to that I wanted to put out this post about something which has upset and annoyed me this morning.

I don't normally post about much that has upset and annoyed me in my business ... these pages are to inspire couples for their wedding and also promote and share the stationery work I create.
However on Saturday I was upset and dismayed to find that a fellow wedding stationer had commented on one of my blog posts, which was sharing one of the bespoke items of stationery I had created for one of my couples, with the words "Here is the right place to purchase Bespoke Stationery" and then a link to her own website!
I can't begin to tell you how much this upset me. Since working in this industry I have found the majority of people I encounter to be not only absolutely lovely and incredibly helpful given we are often competitors in the same market, but also completely and utterly professional in every way. Most of us go out of our way not to copy each others work even if we have similar ideas, not to tread on each others toes and to be as helpful and friendly to others as possible. I have often been asked for advice for example from other stationers or those setting up in business .. and have always tried to be as helpful as I can in return.

I therefore find the behaviour of this individual ( and no I'm not naming and shaming as I wouldn't want to stoop to their level! ) just totally unbelievable.
It happens when you post blogs that people try and be cheeky and post a comment followed by an unashamed link to their own website. If its obviously spam and bears no relation to the post I will delete it. Occasionally if I can see that its from another wedding company but they are not in competition with myself in the stationery market I might let it go .. it depends on the phrasing and friendliness of the comment.
But to blatantly suggest on someone else's blog that your wedding stationery designs are a better option and that their customers should visit your website is beyond reproach.

As you can tell I'm pretty angry about this.
There is no need for this sort of unprofessionalism in our industry and I implore others to not go down this route to promote their own businesses.

Thank you
Nikki

(I'll be posting the originally planned post with lots of gorgeous bespoke stationery & styling later this morning for all you lovely couples out there who are looking for wedding inspiration! x )

A Personal Post : Balancing Your Business & Your Life

Good Morning!
I hope you all had a fantastic weekend! Firstly I'd like to make a huge apology for the sporadic nature of blog posts over the last week. It has been an incredibly stressful week here and I'm afraid that the blog becomes unfortunately the last priority when I have clients orders to finish and get to them on schedule as well as personal stuff to deal with.

And that brings me onto today's post ...

At the beginning of last week, on the last day of our holiday we received bad news from our letting agent to say that our landlord, after agreeing to let us have a long term contract on the house we had fallen in love with when looking for places to move to in Devon, had now decided to consider accepting an offer from a potential buyer on the property.
Now I know this isn't the worse news ever .. no one had died or was ill ... but it turned what would have been an exceptionally busy week anyway, catching up with work after a holiday and starting work on three new stationery orders which I had booked in and needed to complete by the end of the week, into a horrendous week in which I was trying to concentrate on work when all I could think about was where we were going to live next month! I was up until god knows what time in the morning most nights finishing off stationery orders because I had had to go and look at other houses in the evening, or needed to ring our letting agent during the day.
It got to the stage where on Thursday, during a driving lesson I had already got booked in and couldn't cancel, I broke down in tears on my poor driving instructor after failing miserably to parallel park!

Fortunately we had the really good news on Saturday that the offer our landlord was thinking about accepting had fallen through and the letting agent was definitely going to be drawing up a long term contract for us this week. To say I was relieved was an understatement!

This all got me thinking though about how I deal with pressure and stress and how, as someone running their own business, how not to let personal issues get in the way of work.
I think weeks like last week will always happen and in those sorts of situations the only thing to do is to do everything and stay up late till its done. However on a normal week to week basis I do think that the work / personal balance just isn't right sometimes and I need to set aside set times during the day to deal with any personal issues that might get in the way of work.
I'd love to hear about how any other small business owners out there deal with this and perhaps we can all help each other out in staying a little more relaxed!

Nikki x