Meet the Collective: Mary Broddle Embroidery

Buying an embroidery kit is a great way to get started with this craft, and Mary Broddle creates modern kits using traditional methods, as well as teaching online and in person. In this chat, Creativity Found Collective member Mary discusses how embroidery engages the brain's reward centre, reduces stress and offers a productive way to relax. She also discusses her personal experience with chronic pain and fatigue due to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and how embroidery has been a therapeutic outlet for her.
Mary also highlights the importance of trying new creative activities, especially for adults, to break out of routines and to practise self-care through small, daily acts of creativity.
We also discuss the benefits of being part of a creative community as Mary explains how the Creativity Found Collective has helped her connect with like-minded individuals across the country, providing support and opening up new opportunities for her business.

Mary Broddle Embroidery at creativityfound.co.uk
CreativityFound.co.uk

Instagram: @creativityfoundpodcast
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Researched, edited and produced by Claire Waite Brown
Music: Day Trips by Ketsa Undercover / Ketsa Creative Commons License Free Music Archive - Ketsa - Day Trips
Artworks: Emily Portnoi emilyportnoi.co.uk
Photo: Ella Pallet

Click here to book a 1-to-1 online chat with me to understand more about the Creativity Found Collective, the promotional and networking membership for creative small businesses.

Transcript

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and just trying to break it down so people start embroidery and understand the well-being benefits of it by actually experiencing it. Because of the way it engages your brain, it engages the reward centre which overwrites your fight or flight response which then reduces the stress hormones surging around your body. It really calms you down. Being part of the Creativity Found Collective, I'm connecting with people all over the country, which then can lead to other opportunities. It's widening who's seeing me on LinkedIn, on social media, and there's a lot of cheerleading in the creative community, I think. Everyone wants each other to do well. Hi, Claire here. Creating this show inspired me to take the Creativity Found mission further. As well as sharing inspirational stories of people who have embraced their creativity in adulthood, I wanted to actually help people do this for themselves and to support artists and crafters who share their creative knowledge with adults through their classes, kits and supplies. Creativityfound.co.uk and the Creativity Found Collective were born. You can visit creativityfound.co.uk to find ways to learn printmaking, try embroidery, get touchy-feely with clay, make your own kilt, start weaving, learn to paint and so much more. And the wonderful teachers and makers featured on the website are members of the Creativity Found Collective. We also have business support enterprises as members who help others grow their businesses. which means they get to do more of the arting and crafting and less of the businessing. In this episode of the Creativity Found podcast, adapted from a live video posted on the Creativity Found YouTube channel and in the Creativity Found Facebook group, I chat with one of our members about what they do and how they can help you. And if you would like to join our merry band, simply visit creativityfound.co.uk join us and I'll see you soon. Did you actually log out and log back on again? No. No, I didn't though. No, because then I would have got rid of you. I just copied the same links in the same place three times in a row and the third time and the third time it worked. Right. So, theoretically, we are now live in YouTube and on Facebook in the Creativity Found Facebook group, which is lovely. Hi, Mary. How are you? Hello, Claire. I'm all right. Thank you. Good. So, just as a way of introduction, if you haven't watched one of these videos before or if you've not heard of Creativity Found over the next few weeks, I'm going to be doing this going live Facebook, YouTube with Creativity Found collective members. So you can find out what it is they do, how they can help you to find a new creative outlet or to sustain and grow your own small business. Mary, start by telling me how I get people doing embroidery and trying embroidery and getting past that I can't do it, I didn't do needlework at school, I can't do any of it, it won't look good enough and just trying to break it down so people start embroidery and understand the well-being benefits of it by actually experiencing it. So doing some stitching to relax you, reduces your stress levels, engages reward center in your brain. Learning something new is brilliant for sustained brain health. So I do that through kits, which I sell through my website and various shops in and around Nottingham where I am. That's growing. and I teach in-person classes. Currently I do mindful stitching classes in various places once a month and I do kids workshops and I do one-off workshops here and there so I teach embroidery and I teach the visible mending as well which is becoming more of a thing to keep your clothes going for longer and actually make a feature of it to make it really customised and Yeah. So you mentioned about the mindful stitching and the well-being aspect of embroidery. Is that something that you've experienced for Yes. I live with chronic pain and chronic fatigue due to a condition called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. and I've spent a lot of time in the past 20 years stuck in the house with my feet up literally it sounds like I'm wrestling but no literally I can't go and do things and it can be so frustrating and embroidery's helped keep me on an even keel whilst I'm doing that it's really helped my mental health because I feel productive when i'm doing it i don't feel like i'm just wasting time on waiting for everyone to come do things with me i get lost in my stitching i do the majority of my sewing in front of the telly in the evenings i've designed my mindful stitching concepting kits so you can just pick it up and do in front of the telly there are no complicated instructions there's no silence needed you can do it around life happening but it means that you're doing something productive and beneficial with your hands and engaging your brain rather than scrolling on your phone constantly or drinking that glass of wine or G&T. You get the relaxation that you would do from a glass of wine but without the negative effects from it. and so I want people to embrace embroidery and see it as another well-being tool they have and demystify how I also like the idea as you said about sitting in front of the telly but it's one of those activities that you can actually take with you as well. You said about there's not lots of complicated instructions. You can actually put it in your bag like a book to go on the bus to work or to go. It's that on an aeroplane, you know, because that's often something that gets in people's way, is the fact that something needs a space or In fact, my kits come in little tote bags, so you can do that, especially with the mindful stitching where it's about doodling and thread and coming up with your own ideas and just letting it wander. You're not having to constantly refer to a pattern, so all you need is the thread, the hoop, needle, scissors, bit of material and off you go and it can fit in your handbag it can live next to your comfy seat you could have it at your desk at work and go and do it for an hour at lunchtime because you only need 10-15 minutes to start getting that relaxation effect and it is eminently portable in fact you know I've done it sat watching test matches at Trent Bridge which is around the corner from me or doing it in the cafe when you just want to people watch a bit and it's quite a good way of reconnecting with the world even though you're not just staring aimlessly because We're all lost in our digital world, and this just brings you back to something a bit more tangible. And I'm just as bad as anyone else for spending too much time on their phone. So I have to make a conscious effort not to pick it up next time I'm sat in the car waiting for my son's football training to finish, that sort of thing. It's that rush to feel productive and feel like you're doing stuff all the time, and that almost idolizing busyness. Well, actually, let's bring that back and do some craft, do some embroidery. And you can be productive in a total different way. But because of the way it engages your brain, it engages the reward center, which overwrites your fight or flight response, which then reduces the stress hormones surging around your body. It really calms you down and chills you out. And also there's no right or wrong way. What I find is adults, especially a lot of my contemporaries, they don't want to do it unless it's going to look like it would on the box. But if you've just starting, it's not going to look like it would on the box. You've got to practice to get to that stage. And we can all learn something from how children learn. I teach school clubs and some kids do some dog's dinners of backstitch and it's not straight at all and there are big gaps, but they're really pleased because they've learned something new. And we all need to remember that, that it's not going to be perfect unless Yeah, that's a very important point that comes up a lot with guests on the podcast about sometimes it's not actually the thing that you produce that is the important thing. It's the act of the action of creating it and the same about doing things wrong. I think I have a lot of grownups that come to my dance classes and there's no way you're going to be able to do everything that I do in that class the first time you come to that class. There's a lot of things to learn but you can do other things that are equally enjoyable and you might look different to me or the I encourage people when I'm teaching in classes not to unpick. it's like just watch the progression don't unpick it go well that one went wonky i was doing um wreaths christmas wreaths we were sewing those in my mindful stitching classes in december and i'm like well you know foliage isn't uniform does it matter if that one's at a slightly different degree when you step back no one's going to notice because you can just get paralyzed in that well that's not right that's not right actually it's the process not the output and with a lot of my classes where we just do little patches almost it's the hour and a half of connecting with others taking that time out for yourself doing the embroidery learning something like you can do something with this if you want and if you hate it doesn't matter because it was coming and doing the embroidery and spending that time connecting with other people and being creative was more important than what you do with it at Yeah, absolutely. So you've covered quite a few points there with regards to the question that I normally ask on these, which is why you think it's important for grown-ups to be able to try new creative activities. So we've covered quite a few there. Are there any other I think it's just, it's important to get yourself out of ruts. We all get into ruts on routines, especially when you hit some adulthood and middle age, or I'm at the stage where the kids need less attention in the evenings and stuff. So you've got a bit more time to yourself and you're like, oh, what am I going to do? Well, try something. Go on that course that teaches you how to do it. Learn it from YouTube, buy a kit. and just give yourself that time because I'm a great believer in self-care needs to be lots of little things every day every week not a big spa day once a year. if you see what I mean, self-care is using the nice moisturiser, it's doing the embroidery that you enjoy, it's being creative, it's doing the lots of little things every day rather than necessarily a spa day or a big holiday. I physically can't go and do a lot of that stuff anymore so I've learned how to take the enjoyment from the little things. And with embroidery, especially the way my kids go and I teach it, it's not something you have to remember where you were. You don't have to remember how many stitches you've done. You don't have to have marked things off on Yeah, that's really interesting. You've been a member with us here and been joining us on our meetups and things since the beginning pretty much. Why do you like to be a part of a community for I think being a micro-business, it's just me literally in my spare room, is a very isolating thing and you can get stuck in your own head. Especially if, like me, you've started a business for the first time, there's a massive learning curve. My background's engineering, so getting into this whole creative marketing thing, digital admin, social media, using it properly has been a huge learning curve. And by being part of a community of other people doing similar things, you can share ideas, they understand what you're doing, how you're approaching things, you get tips. We were just talking about the way you're streaming this and it almost means I don't have to go off and research everything from scratch. And it gives me a network that's wider than my immediate part of the world. So I live in Nottingham. I've done an awful lot of in-person networking in Nottingham and built my reputation up that way. But by being part of Creativity Fan Collective, I'm connecting with people all over the country, which then can lead to other opportunities. It's widening who's seeing me on LinkedIn, on social media, and there's a lot of cheerleading in the creative community, I think. Everyone wants each other to do well and to help each other rather than it being a competition, which is a really nice thing. So it's really good just Yeah, and when it's someone like yourself, you've got kits, they can go anywhere. Exactly. So you can widen your network across the UK and it could open doors anywhere in the country and Yeah, I think from what I've learned from a lot of other small business people is it just takes that one person to stumble across something and that could give you an opportunity you'd never know about. So you just never know. It's about putting yourself out there, talking to people, getting to meet people and I always say people are really interesting. So don't be scared of them. They're just as nosy and jeer as you are in them. And that's, as well as the online networking, it's one of the reasons I love doing my in-person classes is to get to meet people. That's what I missed from my old life of going out and meeting different people. And I'm just doing it in a totally different way, despite my mobility issues. I think online networking is brilliant. In fact, I felt less isolated during the pandemic because everyone was Yeah. Absolutely. I completely agree. And I too, with the podcast and with the collective, well, the collective came out of the podcast in the biggest lockdown was actually when I widened my digital horizons and that just widened everything. And guests for the podcast are from all over the world now, which is absolutely super. Australia means I have to start a bit earlier in the morning, but we can all meet up. I think that's it. The world is a very connected place and there are really interesting people all over it. And if you're just going to your local business networking, you're missing out on not just opportunities to promote what you do, but just to understand how Perfect and what's coming up for This year I am going to do a bit more on my online presence so I was talking about I'm going to do some YouTube videos looking more about how historical needlework inspires what I do so you can see that link through history into what we're doing now and the whole why I use different techniques and teach slightly differently to a lot of other modern embroiderers. I would say I am a modern embroiderer but I do things based on a different approach and based off the back of that I want to launch my haberdashery online so I get things that I sell in person at my classes and it's sort of like a curated haberdashery so there's stuff you can't pick up in Hobbycraft. I want to get that on my website, but that's going to involve upping my photography game. So I need to work on product photography Well, there you go. That's just all the other elements. So many. I'm also, I've got the local university doing a project for me. I'm finding me more artisan shops that I can place my kits in as wholesale option. Oh, wow. Wow, that's so good. There's so much assistance out there with local universities if you plug into it and in Brilliant, well done you. You know, it gives a project and it gives a practical learning for the university students as well. So it's win-win, isn't it? Yeah. It's a lack of resource and time and money you have as a small business. And they really want real Oh, that is so interesting. Thank you so much, Mary. That was absolutely lovely. Anything else you wanted to mention? My main thing is just don't worry about not being good at whatever creative thing you're having a go at you don't have to be good at it you just need to play yeah and there are a lot of people who try all sorts of different crafts before they find the ones that's for them so try different things go out and meet people at all the craft events that pop up and workshop i do sip and stitch i do mindful stitching there's paint versions there's clay versions there's all sorts why not just go out and do something a bit different to meet people and do the creativity side as well because it's not as scary as just having to go and talk to someone without just staring at Yeah that was a bit like you were saying in the cafe you can actually sit there and look and you don't look quite like a weirdo staring at people. Yeah. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Well, you can find obviously lots of other people who you can engage to go and try a creative activity at creativityfound.co.uk. In the comments here, there is a link to Mary's page. It's easily found on the classes page. It's very easy to find all of our members. On that page, you will find links to all of Mary's social media as well, including the YouTube that you were talking about, Mary. So you I'm aiming for a decent video a month. Very good. I think that's realistic. Yeah. Yeah. Very good. This recording, this has been streamed and this is using Riverside, which is the platform I also use to record the podcast and I very much like it. It does clever video things as well, which is great and saves me a little bit of time. There is a link in here in the description for Riverside. There is also a link to Buzzsprout because those are the people I host my podcast with. If anybody is thinking of podcasting, I suggest you give that hosting company a look. So there are lots of links in the description. Thanks again, Mary. Really, really super to speak to you and I'll see you soon. Thanks so much for listening to Creativity Found. I hope you enjoyed this episode and gained some value from it. If you did, perhaps you'd like to contribute a small monetary sign of appreciation, either by becoming a regular supporter from as little as $3 per month using the link in the show notes, or if you're listening on a value for value enabled app, such as Fountain, Truefans or Podverse, feel free to send a few sats my way. I also occasionally promote products that I personally use, so please use the affiliate link where relevant if you are buying from those fine companies. Thanks so much, I really appreciate it.