On Friday afternoon I received a phone call from a lady desperate for something to wear to a major sporting/social event that will be held next week. The words ‘I’m too fat to buy anything in the shops and please just run me up a skirt’ were said. And then there were tears.
I am also desperate. For money. So,after first offering it to my kind of business partner MKBP who immediately said ‘NO’. I said ‘YES’.
The following morning the lady came to visit. She was fat but not that fat and nice but what you would call difficult. I ended up agreeing to make a top and skirt, so far removed from my usual 1950s nipped in waist look it was in fact the reverse. However I would be paid £240 plus fabrics.
I have now just finished the said outfit, it looks nice but I am filled with my usual anger and resentment. This is the way I always feel about bespoke clients. Unreasonably I feel like they have caused me great pain and I don’t know why. I think I have developed a full blown phobia. A phobia of producing work I don’t want to do.
Now comes the usual anxiety, what if it doesn’t fit, what if she doesn’t like it (she won’t like it because this woman hates herself) what if she makes me do more work. She already wants me to make her a top. She even suggested that she starts a fat lady dress company with her friend and I would make them. At the time I smiled, inside I was screaming! *
The £240 will be really helpful, I really need it. I haven’t had to suck cock for this money, I haven’t had fry burgers or even work in a clothes shop (which was my worst job of all time). Someone has paid me money for the job I want to do.
What’s wrong with me?
Lesson: Do NOT take on bespoke work you don’t really want.
*I don’t have a problem with curvy people. Curves look great on healthy people. I do have a problem when addicted out of control people pile so much food into their bodies they produce a mass of blueberry pricked depressed dough. Which then becomes my problem.
This customer then missed an appointment because she was making pudding. For real.
indiedesignersurvival 