It Started with a Bookmark
I was wandering around Southern Seminary Bookstore in Louisville with my son, Luke, my daughter-in-law, Sarah, and Mark. I love bookstores – how organized they are, filled with enticing titles, promising ideas, new knowledge and spiritual self-improvement. The children’s book section was especially fun-filled. The store had clothes, comfy chairs, study rooms, and an adjoining coffee shop. It was huge. We spent an hour there.
When I got to the cashier with my book to purchase, I asked, “Do you have bookmarks?”
“No ma’am, we don’t have bookmarks,” the student checker replied.
“What? How could they not have an inspirational bookmark?” I asked. Luke shrugged and laughed. “I guess we use whatever.”
I suddenly remembered the Jerusalem bookmark!
Beyond Bookmarks
I was excited after my meandering through the bookstore. I was busily noticing bookmarks – beaded stringy ones, cardstock-designed, big paperclips with a butterfly or flower on the end --even scraps of paper--but nothing as creative as my new idea to create scripture bookmarks.
I returned home full-of-ideas and dug around for the Jerusalem and Bethlehem bookmarks my Grandma Winkler brought home from her Holy Land trip years ago. I found the Jerusalem bookmark and went about trying to figure out how it was made.
A couple of guys at a local sewing center whipped one up on their embroidery sewing machines. I now “needed” this fancy machine to start spitting out bookmarks!
I bought an embroidery sewing machine through an offer at the State Fair and went to work. It took a couple of hours to produce my first bookmark.
Trips to the sewing center to ask about fabric bunching and ugly knots only revealed the bleak response: your letters are too small.
I showed Mark my finished product and he commented, “It seems too limp for a bookmark.”
Luke asked how long it took to make. “About two hours,” I replied.
“Mom, how many bookmarks are you realistically going to have time to make?”
OH. NO.
Greek and Hebrew
Maybe if I embroidered some Greek and Hebrew letters on the bookmarks, it would be quicker. Then, I could add the English-word meaning on the back of the bookmark. I purchased needed embroidery files for the sewing machine, this time, the Greek and Hebrew alphabet.
I then learned that Hebrew is written right to left.
Not all the Greek letters would embroider, even onto the now heavier canvas fabric I purchased. I needed to find Greek letters that were the same as English letters. “Pistis”/“belief.” (Yes, that’s on the back of a bookmark). Verse on the front, “pistis” on the back. I was certain I could find other inspiring Greek words for the bookmark back.
Better yet, maybe I should embroider Greek words on T-shirts. I watched all the T-shirt embroidery videos I could find. Once set-up, they almost made themselves! Multi-needle machines seemed to be key to making this work. Why had I purchased a single-needle home machine?
Luke did a quick Greek word T-shirt Google search and said, “They have those, Mom. I’m going to ask my friend Joel about his drop-shipping business.”
What’s that?
Scaling
I had no idea what scaling was…I came to understand that I needed to have a mechanism for making something faster than two hours. Meaning, embroidered bookmarks were not going to work.
I started doing research around T-shirts.
Then, Mark and I took a class about telling our story. Who we were, who we are now, and why. The directions were to complete a story we could tell in two minutes. Shorter if possible. Not our life story, but how our beliefs flipped and took shape.
The T-shirts suddenly made more sense.
They can help tell your story.
They can teach.
Author: Cheryl, Co-Creator of Tummy Tees
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