In the lockdown of May 2020, I was at home with a 5 month old baby while my younger brother, Tom, was seriously ill in hospital with complications from Leukaemia... not the maternity leave I had dreamed of by a long shot!
I have always been somebody who needs to be doing something. I find it really hard to just sit and watch a box set if I am not doing something else at the same time whether it be lesson planning for my role as a secondary school teacher or drawing on my iPad (although this is not something that I am particularly good at!).
That May, I could feel my mental health rapidly deteriorating with the monotony and sadness of everything that was going on around me. I needed something to keep me busy so I started to look at YouTube craft videos to see what I could make with supplies that I already had.
I found a video of a woman making a rainbow which seemed incredibly apt, given that our windows were adorned with rainbows at the time, so I gave it a go. The first one that I made was for my cousins little girl, Pearl. It wasn't the best but for the couple of hours that I spent making it, my mind drifted off. I was no longer thinking about how terrible things were and I was just concentrating on winding the yarn and forming the stripes of my rainbow. It lifted my mood instantly.
A couple of my friends suggested that I make a batch and sell them, so I did. I started an Instagram page, Fred & Pearl, and uploaded 10 little rainbows to Etsy. They sold out that night! So I bought some more coloured yarns and made more rainbows, only for them to sell out time and time again. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was achieving something and my mind was focussed on my brand new little business.
During this time, my brother passed away. I didn't mention it on my business page for a long time. It was my escape... a little world where bad things didn't happen. I even carried on posting the week after he had died as though my world hadn't fallen down around me. Social media has a pretty bad name for itself when it comes to mental health but without my Instagram business, I don't know how I would have got through those weeks.
I was receiving messages from people offering stories about what the rainbow means to them and how much joy it brought them to buy one of mine. I had people place orders to be sent to their friends who they missed or new mums who were struggling with loneliness. In a world that seemed cruel, harsh and incredibly unfair, I felt like Fred and Pearl created a little bit of joy.