about

Hey there, I'm Ashlyne! 

I'm a 14-year-old who loves all kinds of crafts, especially sewing and crochet :). I love to share my newest creations with my local community and hear what they think. Little Spools was birthed out of a passion to create and share the joy out of every little thing in life with the people around me! I have been sewing and crocheting for almost 3 years now and I've enjoyed every second of it. If you're looking to start your own creative journey, my advice is DON'T HESITATE! I started not knowing where I was going with my craft, and I've come a long way since then :)

what I love

My favourite things to do are sewing, crocheting, scrapbooking, reading, journaling, and dancing! (I also love sleeping and food :p)

what I love about Little Spools

Little Spools is not just a way for me to earn some side cash or as an outlet to unleash my wacko ideas, but it's something I cherish as being central to my bonding time with my family. We love collaborating on and discussing my designs and plans for my products, deciding what fabrics to use, and testing out the effectiveness of different products. I especially enjoy taking bits of scraps too small to make anything standard and brainstorming ways to transform them into works of art. With lots of fun and experimentation I've found the creative process is often way more fun than surveying the final piece (which is also fun)! 

what I'd define Little Spools as:

family, creativity, passion, fun, and life lessons in hard work and perseverance!

how to get in touch

I'd love to hear your thoughts on anything - from the weather, to the current news, and of course about anything here on my blog or to do with Little Spools. 

P.S. I loooove to hear from my customers about their experience with us, so please don't hesitate to email or message me if you have any questions or comments about any Little Spools products! 

P.P.S. I looooooove collecting new ideas for products, so if you have anything you'd like to see in our range please let me know! (Little Spools is all about expansion and innovation, so crazy ideas are welcomed too!!)

What this blog is about

I post entries about our stalls, announcements about new products, and bits and bobs of my creative adventures (the funniest, most inspiring, and unusual stuff!). 

Additionally, check out my website for our great range of products: https://sites.google.com/view/littlespools 

I'd love to know what you want to see on this space, or if you have any cool ideas for what I should make next! Drop me an email at littlespools.byash@gmail.com or message us on Instagram if you've got some ideas!

The Little Spools story 

Recently, I've gotten quite a few questions about why, when and how I started my business. Rather than retelling it over and over to different people (and messing up a few details each time), I've decided to write it down and have it on this page, so that anyone looking for inspiration to start their own small business can learn from my experiences (and hopefully reach success faster than I did!). 

But first, the prologue: 

• If you have any questions or thoughts about anything in this story, you're always welcome to drop me an email. I'd love to hear your thoughts, discussion is helpful for everyone! 

• This is all about respect, really. Any work that is published online, whether by some big company or by an independent entrepreneur like me, is the work of the owner alone. No one else has the right to copy, edit, or change in any way this piece of work. Within the online crafting community there have been many cases of theft and piracy of work and other things that totally disrespect the work of the designer/author. Please respect our hard work and treat it as you'd like your own work to be treated. By all means, read and enjoy the story, but don't share the plain text with anyone (you can provide the link to this page instead). Thank you for respecting my work!

• You also CANNOT publish this information or share this story on another platform in whatever shape or form, without my permission. If you wish to reproduce my story and have it up (eg. like a testimonial or part of an article) on your website, please contact me directly before going any further.

• Because the internet is so unguarded nowadays, I have purposely left some minute details (names, etc) out of the story for privacy's sake. However, if you're anxious to know a particular name, like where I learnt to sew (so you can do it too), please contact me! 

Now let's get started! 

I hope you enjoy reading the success story of Little Spools, from a little spark to a roaring fire :) 

It's a short read - remember, this is just the origin, and the next chapters are yet to come!

You’ll be surprised to hear that I wasn’t actually a very big fan of sewing in the beginning. Anything to do with yarn and cloth and fibre arts went completely over my Gen Z head as “old fashioned”. But gradually, I came to realise that the myth/stereotype of “only grandmas do so and so”, is false. And in fact, there’s a whole  big community of young fibre artists that’s growing out there! You’ll learn more as the story unfolds. 

It all started during a school holiday break in 2019 when Mum decided I needed a new hobby to get me off my phone! She came home one day and said, “guess what, I’ve signed you up for a one day sewing class. It’s gonna be amazing, you’ll love it!”. Naturally, I was slightly less than enthusiastic. To my twelve-year-old mind, sewing was something for grandmas. And so I told her. But she pointed out that all the knitting I was doing at the moment was also very characteristic of female octogenarians. Undaunted, I invented new excuses and protests to try and get out of it. But Mum was adamant. Thank goodness for that spirit, because if she’d given in and cancelled the class, I would’ve been on a very different track. Let’s follow that thought and see where I would have (probably) ended up today.

At the time of this fateful sewing class, I was very “into” the world of knitting. Introduced to the art through my younger sister, who was part of a Knit Club in her school, I fell in love with the charm of yarn and the aesthetic quality of making each knitted piece. Yarn because my new obsession and this would prove to be quite useful eventually (but more of that later!). So, by the time Mum came around with the idea to try sewing, I was deep into the yarn side of things and not so much the cloth side. I had plans to take up crocheting immediately and make little toys and stuff to sell! So I formed my argument around that: I’ll still be doing a new hobby, just not sewing. I actually have an interest in crocheting unlike this class you’re making me go to! If she’d said yes and let me do my thing, I’d probably be crocheting my head off and focusing my entire efforts and energy on making yarn babies. My horizons would remain narrow and I would continue to regard sewing as a boring grandma’s retirement activity. I’m happy to say that we never went down that path because looking back, I would have lost the opportunity to develop so many skills that would be useful later in life. 

So, I went for that one-day class. The lady was really nice and patiently taught me the basics of working a sewing machine. Then she announced we were making a dress. So we went through the steps bit by bit: pin the pattern, cut out the fabric, sew the parts together and assemble the dress. I remember that halfway through, when we got to the invisible zipper step, I decided it was too hard (and she did too!) so she ended up doing it for me. To this day I’ve never quite gotten the hang of that zipper. A task for another day. 

But unconsiously, I developed a liking for this strange art of a little needle chug-chugging its way through endless mounds of fabric. It wa strangely satisfying in a way completely different to knitting. And seeing the final product slowly appear, from armholes to hems to frills to linings, was something that I’d never really got to see so clearly in my knitting expeditions. By the end of the 6 hours I’d fallen head over heels, and Mum gave me an “I told you so” look when she came. I begged her for more classes and she happily signed me up for another term’s worth.

During the 9+ months I was in that sewing class, I looked forward to every Monday afternoon where for one hour I could learn to create clothes and bags, something I had deemed almost unfathomable only a year or two before. By the end of three terms, I had made at least 6 different garments and a cool patchwork bag. This was in classes alone - at home, I was ploughing away by myself during the week. I got a secondhand machine as soon as we found a good one, headed to Spotlight for fabrics, and jumped straight into it. So while I was creating fashion masterpieces (ha, ha) in class and polishing up my dressmaking skills, I was also keeping my head fresh with the basics and a bit more by making tiny projects at home. Like bookmarks, pouches, and more. And I grew my skill inventory - Velcro turned into clasps which turned into full-on zippers! After a while, I realised that I was growing my dressmaking skills through the classes, but my utility sewing skills mostly came from self-practice and Youtube. After those three terms I felt like since I'd learnt all the basics and a lot more, that I was ready to go out into this big sea solo and work my way through the waves with the help of the Internet and books. Especially since the classes were a big expense, which could be turned into budget for my materials and sewing tools. So we stopped those sewing classes, but my train of stitches didn’t run out of steam. 

Now, you’re wondering: what about the knitting? You said you were sooo committed to it and wanted to do crochet, did that just get blown out of the water by this new thing? 

After I started sewing, knitting gradually lost its former glitter. I realised that I didn’t really hold any lasting interest for the craft because 1) sewing had much more versatility, and 2) it wasn’t going to fulfil my stuffed toy dream. So that hobby went into hibernation and never really resurfaced again. Maybe it will one day, but personally I still feel that it doesn’t strike a chord with me. 

As for crochet, I was so busy with this new venture that I had hardly any time to think about taking up another hobby. The novelty of new tools and materials and all the possibilities that sewing opened up totally made me forget about any crocheting dream I had. 

For now. More on that later! 

Fast forward a couple of months later. I’m still in the honeymoon phase of sewing and I just got a project at school, called “Create your own business”. It had to 1) be original, 2) have a logo that we’d designed ourselves. Well, I had two ideas. One was a hand-lettering business and the other (you guessed it) was a sewing business! I couldn’t decide which to pick, so I did a logo for both. “Ink It In” and “Little Spools” became the main contenders for this project. In the end, I reached a compromise: I would use the hand-lettering idea for my project, but I would start a little side project “Little Spools” - aka my real-life sewing business! For real! I could actually make a living out of this skill and knock off some of the expenses I spent on all my materials. That way, I could continue making what I loved and still get compensated for doing it. 

In the beginning, it was mainly a scrunchie business. They were all the trend among my peers so I made a couple of bucks quite quickly! I was happy to continue on as a scrunchie retailer but Mum insisted I expand my line. “We’re gonna do this seriously. You can get yourself a car this way!” So we made an email, designed a business card, and spread the word. In the meantime I was building my inventory. Soon, my product range expanded and Mum decided it would be a great idea to have a stall outside our house for a week in the holidays so we could find our footing. It did really well, to my surprise, and everyone we knew in the neighbourhood plus some others came along and supported us. (the wonder of Facebook!) 

After the success of the first few sales I started to focus more seriously on Little Spools. To be a contender in the artisan world, my business needed to be promoted and supported. We’d nailed the second part pretty well already, but I wanted to gain an established presence. So, equipped with my less than perfect IT skills, I put together a website and blog (this one!). This was all we needed in the beginning as the orders started to flow in really quickly! After the first stall (outside our house), a friend of ours introduced us to the idea of market stalls. We started signing up to be stallholders at craft fairs, outdoor markets, and the like. This gained us lots of attention too and I found a ready network of customers and fellow business owners who supported me and encouraged me to keep sewing and running the business! 

And as they say, the rest is history. I started to run stalls regularly (about once or twice a month) and because familiar with the art of markets and crafts and small businesses. And after a while, when the novelty wore off but the passion remained, I went looking for another craft. Crocheting came to mind first and I thought, what if we expanded Little Spools to include sewing AND crocheting? So I grabbed a crochet kit and struggled through by myself. I’m proud to say that I learnt all my crochet techniques the old fashioned way - reading! To this day I’ve never ever watched a Youtube video on learning a stitch or technique. I plowed through using pattern books and written blog posts. I read up on the types of hooks, yarn weights, and crochet terminology to read patterns and improve my work. I was able to hold a consistent tension from the beginning, so working tight or loose was easy for me - I just had to switch hooks or crochet looser without worrying that some stitches would be tight and some would be loose. As the months flew by, I progressed from squares to tiny bees and whales to regular sized dolls. I found a love for this fibre art that I’d never felt for knitting. It was different to sewing, because instead of a machine creating stitches, YOU created them. You were the one who worked the hook and decided how it turned out. It was overall more personal and satisfying to complete an amigurumi project than it was to finish a garment. 

I still want to stress that even though crocheting takes up a significant amount of time in my week, sewing is still a vital part of my life. I still and will continue to love it and all the challenges, opportunities and fun it presents. It gives me a chance to explore a vast collection of techniques and skills that crochet doesn’t, like working with special tools, operating and maintaining my machine, and experimenting with different fabrics for differemt feels and looks. In the same way, crochet opens many doors that sewing limits. I’m able to experiment with my ideas more freely because I’m the one making the stitches, not a machine. It’s easier to design my own original creations because I can think like an artist would: my hook and yarn is my brush and canvas. It’s like “drawing”, but 3D! I’m able to channel my artistic and creative side and go wild with colours in amigurumi. In sewing, I can stay practical and expand my tips and tricks for reusing materials and finding a use for everything. So in conclusion, I can happily say that sewing and crochet work in tandem in my life now, and even though their origin stories are slightly different - sewing was learnt and crochet was self-taught - I’ve managed to achieve considerable success with both my hobbies. And this would not be possible without all the efforts of my family and the support of my customers and friends. All of our joint efforts have grown Little Spools into a successful side business for me to express my love for sewing and crochet. And as the new year rolls in, I’m super excited to see what comes next. I can’t wait to fulfil my craft goals this year and continue working on what I love. 

So, this story isn’t done yet - it’s awaiting another chapter.

I’m so excited for you to join me on this journey. Your support, whether it be through buying my handmade products or sharing the message of my business with your friends and family, is the driving factor behind what I do and why I keep on doing it. Without you, Little Spools is just a high school kid’s amateur way of earning pocket money. But with such an amazing and supportive craft community - both local and online - and loyal customers, Little Spools has grown to become an established craft business that’s committed to providing lovingly made and useful products for everyone. 

Yarn on and stay safe! I can’t wait to continue this story!