When I say this crafter is yummy I think you’ll understand what I mean. Feast your eyes on one of the many goodies available at Le Beckery, Becky’s new Etsy shop:
Hungry yet?
Well, good news: all of the handmade goodies at Le Beckery are made with as many organic and fair trade ingredients as possible. Becky hopes to expand soon into an all-organic selection of treats with some vegan options, too. As it stands now, her intriguing edibles include such rarities as Breakfast Dessert (yes, please!) and palm-sized, wheat and dairy-free Lembas. Everything in her shop seems to be swimming in some combination of chocolate, peanut butter or coconut.
Trying really hard not to lick my screen right now. Let’s have Becky take over from here.
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Describe your biz for us.
I’m a baker. I’m primarily working on fancier cookies, but I look forward to adding breads and candy.
When and how did you decided to pursue your craft as a business?
I decided to actually go through with pursuing this as a business in February after entertaining the idea for a couple of months. I wanted to make a profession by crafting something and baking is what I do best. It also is a pretty emotional endeavor for me, I’ve created the recipes over the years with certain people in mind and making them recreates the feelings I have about those people and the time that the recipe came about.
How did you come up with your business name?
I’m not quite sure. It struck me one night when I came back from my other job at a group home. The girls looooove to play with the name Becky and that dirty Pyles song (“Gimme that Beck-ay”) has had them running with lately. I guess hearing my name had it running in my head along with “bakery” and it hit! The “le” part was put in place mainly because someone else had already had the brilliant idea of “the beckery”…unfortunately, they’re not a seller. I didn’t want to confuse people, so I appropriated the French article and made the actual operation consistent with my etsy name.
What does your “average” work day look like?
I wake up at about 8 if I don’t have to substitute teach. I have a glass of water and get going on baking or decorating. By 1 pm I’m ready to ship what I’ve worked on. I take a break and on some days at 3pm I work at a group home for teenage girls. I get back at about 11pm and start working on orders again (while watching hilariously tacky horror films and listening to the click click of my boyfriend writing scripts for his cartoon show). I’m up until about 2 and usually finish the orders in the morning.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned so far in starting your own crafty business?
1. Postage kicks you in the ass.
2. People are more receptive than you might think.
3. The condensation on the chocolate after you take it out of the fridge makes things difficult, especially for someone as impatient as I am.
4. The very biggest lesson, though, is having realized a dream (even if only temporarily). Who’d have thought it’d come true?!
What inspires you most?
Laughter, people…since most of my recipes are reminiscent of good times and people I love, I guess those would be my biggest inspiration. Nothing makes me feel closer to people than laughter.
Also, nature. I feel most free when I’m outdoors and someplace wild. Believe it or not, it actually really influences my taste and decorative leanings when it comes to baking.
What’s your favorite tool, technique or project?
My favorite project pertaining to Le Beckery is creating different butter or bettercream (dairy free buttercream) frostings. My favorite tool is a good spatula with a defined edge. It makes things sooooo much easier and neater!
What’s your earliest crafty memory?
I have nightmares about my days as a girl scout….gluing felt to more felt while I heard about the boy scouts doing ropes courses etc. Eventually, though, I was in a troop that did interesting crafts …I have a horrendous Easter Bunny door hanging made of a straw hat that was incredibly fun to make and, while it’s scary, it’s pretty cool. We also baked occasionally. My first baking memory, though is sitting with my back against a pea green refrigerator licking the chocolate off of a spatula my mom gave me as a reward for “good stirring”. I was maybe two years old and remember being so excited, but also very aware of how much chocolate I was getting on myself without being able to do anything about it!
What the biggest challenge (if any) you’ve had to overcome in pursuing your craft?
The biggest challenge has been figuring out how best to ship these babies.
It’s also been believing that people believe in me. I was really moved when so many people I knew from the near and distant past became fans of my facebook page and reached out to help me promote this. It really means a lot.
If you had time, what new medium/technique/project would you want to tackle?
I would love to make my own clothes! I have a few very talented friends with fashion projects and businesses and I envy being versatile with that medium. Right now, I think I would settle for learning how to alter my pants correctly.
Thanks for the interview, Becky! You can visit Becky and Le Beckery here.
Yahoo for the holidays and thank god they’re over. These are the place cards I made for our big vegan x-mas dinner. The theme was Rockstar Virgin Christmas. I like that the Virgin Mary, Britney Spears and Lady Gaga are all represented here. I made these on a whim at my mother-out-law’s house so they are comprised entirely of sharpie, pen, scotch tape (no white glue!), computer paper, metallic angel cutouts and a few issues of Entertainment Weekly.
(We had 5 people at dinner - the 6th card with Lady Gaga on it is for Elijah, the angel who comes to Passover. I always like to have a little Passover in my holidays.)
Happy 2010 everyone!
Ok, so I’m pretty much vegan these days.
BUT I have a serious weakness for leather.
RANT ALERT. Seriously, it’s no secret that I’m not into killing and/or mistreating our animal friends. I think the way the meat industry works in this day and age is straight up sick and wrong.
Now, if I were starving out in the woods would I rather die than kill and eat an animal? Certainly not.
Here’s what a lot of folks don’t understand: The whole starving-in-the-woods situation is totally different than choosing to pay someone to raise mistreated animals only to kill them for you so you can eat meat and not think about or deal with the animal you are consuming. As a consumer, it’s impossible to honor the animal when you are totally removed from its life and death. This store-bought disconnect is just so sad for the animal AND the meat eater.
Oh yeah - and that’s not even including the whole host of nasty environmental issues that arise from the unnecessary over-population and over-concentration of certain “livestock” on our planet.
Anyway, it’s for these reasons that I never buy new leather. I usually get it second hand. Politics aside, it is a superior material in a lot of ways and I figure it’s better not to waste it once its already been created. (Yes – people do see me wearing it and no - they don’t know that it’s recycled and, yes, this theoretically does encourage other people in their consumption of meat/leather products. No comment. Don’t really know what to do about it.)
My one request: Please, if you’re going to use this pattern, DON’T use brand new leather that you bought anonymously from the store. Find it, recycle it, hunt it and tan it yourself -whatever. Just be connected to and ok with where it came from. Or, heck, use the fake stuff. =)
Finally! The Tutorial!
Stuff you’ll need:
Medium-sized scraps of leather
Leather punch
Scissors
Step 1: Stand in front of a mirror with your leather. Hold the biggest piece up to your torso and decide which side is up. Often times the extreme edges of the hide will be the most interesting-looking and the least desirable to serious leatherworkers because of the (neato) inconsistencies. I used one of these edges for the bottom of my top.
Step 2: Cut a flattened triangular yoke from a smaller scrap. Make the top and the bottom about an inch longer than you’d like the finished product to be. You will be folding these edges over.
Step 3: Make a leather thong. No, not the underwear kind. A leather thong is a piece of leather “thread” that you use to sew pieces of leather together. The good news is you don’t need to buy this separately because you can make it yourself from a scrap of leather! Basically, you cut the scrap into a circle and start cutting it into a spiral shape – eventually ending up with a long strip of leather. I found a very nifty picture of this process on PaleoPlanet:
Stretch the cord out once you’re done cutting. Leather is very stretchy (especially in small pieces) and if you don’t stretch it out ahead of time, it’ll stretch out by itself. If it does this after you’ve sewn with it, all your seams will gap open. Bad.
Step 3: Now you’re ready to attach the yoke to the body of your top. I had to cut a straight line into the top of my halter where I wanted my yoke to be attached so that the seam would be a straight one. Once you have that worked out, fold the bottom edge of your yoke up (to the right side). Place the folded-over edge on top of the top edge of the body of your top. (I said top three times!) Use your hole punch to pre-punch the holes you are going to be sewing into to attach the yoke to the body.
I used a fancy embroidery stitch to give the top some pizzazz. It’s a modified lazy daisy stitch. I found good tutorials for this stitch here and here.
(Tip: If you’re having difficulty pushing the thong through your pre-punched holes, you can use your scissors to shape the end of your thong into a point. This can help smooth things along.)
Step 4: Make another leather thong for the halter part. Fold the top edge of yoke back (to the wrong side) over your halter thong, creating an encasement for it. I used a simple slip stitch to secure this part of my halter. You can see the pattern in this picture:
Step 5: Secure the back ties. I used a natural hole in the hide as one of my securement points. You can do this or punch a hole yourself in either side. Using another leather thong, fold the thong in half and push the fold through one of the holes about half way. Take the tail ends of your thong and poke them through the loop that should be sticking out of the hole. Pull the ends tight. Repeat for the other side.
ALL DONE!! Each one of these will look different depending on the hide you use, the shape you cut it, the length you choose for the bodice, etc. The possibilities are endless!
Let me know how it goes for you if you decide to give this a try. =)
