When To Let Go

And when to start pushing back

Well hello there, subscribers. It’s been a while since I’ve written to you all, and I do apologise. In the time I’ve been away I have visited Turin, hiked in the Italian Alps, and run a rug weaving workshop for which I constructed 6 new rug looms from scratch. 

Believe me when I say I fully planned to keep on top of work while overseas. I clanked aboard the airplane at Gatwick with my laptop, work phone and hard drives in tow. In my 8 years of self-employment I have never, ever, not even once, fully switched off from running my business. 

But then… Italy happened. Even I, a hardened workaholic, cannot resist its charms. Faced with the option of exploring a beautiful new city or crafting another instagram reel I caved and picked the former. And who wants to open their laptop when this is their view outside?

Because I’m me, I still managed to post once or twice on social media and answer emails. But also, as is often the case on holiday, I found myself reflecting on my life back home. Our holiday was full of long, slow evenings, watching the sun slowly set over the Aosta valley, with plenty of time to think. 

What is it that’s brought me to where I am? What might I change when my holiday ends? 

As you might know, this was the year I decided to stop selling art. Prior to that, Balfour & Co had made up around 70% of my yearly turnover, with sales of my woven work covering the rest. My plan for 2023 was to make Balfour & Co my sole source of income, and increase sales to replace the income I was losing by no longer selling my tapestries. 

Now it’s July. 7 months on, instead of managing to expand Balfour & Co, the business has actually shrunk. In purely financial terms, 2023 has been the toughest year I’ve ever had. 

I’ve written about coming to terms with this here on my Substack, and how I’ve strategised my next steps going forward. In my writing, I’ve been wrestling with the fact that in order to increase my turnover to sustainable levels, I would need to put everything into Balfour & Co. Generating 100% of my income through it would require 100% of my time. It would mean packing away my looms, putting the Christabel Balfour instagram and website on pause, and shuttering this Substack. It would mean devoting myself full time to teaching weaving, instead of making art.

In London, a city where a decent flat white costs £4 and rents seem to rise every month, doubling down on Balfour & Co feels like the financially savvy move. It’s an established business and brand, with products that I know people like. There’s a million things I could do to grow it further, whether that’s taking out a business loan, teaching more workshops or running more online courses. 

But in the Aosta Valley, where we ate like kings for a fraction of what we’d spend in Hackney, and a good coffee costs €2, things looked very different. I realised I was not ready to put my dream of being an artist completely on hold. Even if it turns out to ultimately be impossible, I know I owe it to myself to try. 

I think this point comes in the life of any small business owner or creative person. When things fundamentally aren’t working, what do you do? How do you know if it’s time to let go and do something else, or if it’s time to start pushing back? I guess it ultimately depends on the person, what their capacity is and what they value. For me, I know I work best when I have a battle to fight and a problem to solve. Becoming an artist in the first place was a huge gamble, and I’m not going to give it up now. 

Of course it’s one thing to make Big Decisions About Your Life while you’re on holiday and feeling on top of the world, it’s another thing to go through with them once you’re back home. I arrived back in London to a whirlwind of packing online orders and transforming the studio for another rug weaving workshop. 

But the determination to recommit to my own art hasn’t gone away. This weekend, as I watched my students slowly weave their own rugs row by row from strands of brightly coloured yarn, the conviction only solidified. Much as I love teaching weaving, there’s so much more that I want to create. I want to weave for myself. 

There will be challenges ahead. There are reasons why I stopped selling art in the first place, which I know I will have to confront. And after months of neglect my creative drive is feeling withered and faint. But watching the clouds unfurl themselves over the mountains I thought about the huge wide sky of possibilities that my art once seemed to hold. It’s still there, that sky. The great open expanse is waiting for me. I just have to look up. 

Finally - some housekeeping. I began this Substack with the lofty goal of posting twice a week. Predictably, I’m now revising this because a) I want to make art, not sit in front of my laptop all day and b) even my most ardent fans probably don’t need to hear from me that frequently.

So going forward, I will be posting 3 free posts and 3 paid posts a month, prioritising quality over quantity, and planning my writing schedule out a little more. 

On Friday 21st July, I’ll be sharing how I’m freeing up my time from Balfour & Co and the challenge I set myself of producing 12 weeks of marketing content in 1 week. This will be for paid subscribers, but free subscribers will get a preview.

On Friday 28th July for all subscribers, I’ll be sharing about how I’m working through my hang-ups around selling art and getting creatively unblocked.