I'm opening a Cafe in Limerick-The Stormy Teacup

It's been quite a while since I updated this blog, 2013 was a pretty strange year so I took a break from blogging. Part of this strangeness was re-evaluating my life and what I wanted, in the latter half this involved looking at what I want to do professionally. Having Nice Day Designs has been amazing but it hasn't been enough to live on, the balance of trying to make money out of crafts can sometimes feel creatively suffocating, I've realised after lots of soul searching that something needed to change.

As some of you may know I have run a craft pop-up shop Limerick Craft and Design for the past two years, and I was also heavily involved with Limerick City of Culture over the past several months. These two project taught me that I wanted to move more into retail, but do it for myself. The Creative Limerick projects, as great as they are, are not sustainable in the long term(because of the tenancy agreements), so it looked like I was gonna have to do something privately. All of these ideas about change, and my frustrations with craft were mulling around for a long time. About a year ago I became really good friends with fellow craftsperson Martins Punculis, we spent endless hours talking about how we could set up something really interesting, and eventually in the new year we decided to go for it.

Myself and Martins are opening a craft shop with an artisan tea and coffee shop upstairs, and we're calling it The Stormy Teacup. I am so excited by this new venture, I feel like it's the accumulation of all of my professional experiences; weaving together my experience in sales, hospitality, craft and books. That mixed with Martins unending enthusiasm and fanatical logic means that we make a really good team. We've already found a venue for this exciting new space and are currently in the process of raising funds for it on the crowd funding site Indiegogo. We've set a target of €6000 (but are actually aiming for €10,000), and we've managed to raised over €1,800 in 5 days. We have been amazed by the fantastic response, and only hope that this means we will reach our target in time.

Putting together an really good pitch for Indiegogo was a lot of work but we felt that it was worth it for the amount of money that we are asking for. We spent over a week working on the above stop motion animation, working lots of late nights and very longs days; from research we knew that the video is an integral part of the success of the campaign. If you want to read more about our dream cafe then head over to our campaign, if you have any money to spare we have rewards like this set of badges from as little as €7, every donation counts. 

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