here are some photos of the clothes for you all to look at

with their lovely new beej swing tags. (thanks jodie)

getting ready for the young blood designers market application 

and to tour the retail shops for orders to be made

wish me luck!

and the bags

dolly looking very stylish. ready to take on the world

Hey all, well finally the swing tags are finished and in my hot little hands. So no excuses now. Savar is here in Australia at the moment which is great and so i have been doing all the tourist things with him. We will head down to Sydney on a road trip on Wednesday for 5 days. Weather or not we will go to see shops to try and get orders remains to be seen, but i will be doing research while i am there. i will be applying to do the young blood designers market which is in sydney in august and hopefully will get in to do that i will also be making some jewellery to sell with the beads that i got on my previous trip to india this will hopefully make me enough money to buy my next plane ticket back to india for the end of august. I will also be posting my new range on etsy.com as soon a possible. i am trying all avenues to get the orders and to get the garments out there for all to see, and so we can get the women working. will keep you posted.

      

the women start with 10 days payed training where they learn the designs and the stitches required to create the garments.

  Well here it is my first ever blog. I thought what a great way to get some of my ideas and designs out there and a great place for people to see what's going on with Beej.

Beej is a business i set up with my boyfriend Savar on a my last trip to India. it has been my dream for about 19 years to have a fair trade business and to be able to be creative and change peoples lives at the same time. I was first inspired to do this when I worked for the body shop and Anita Ruddock had started to do fair trade with paper makers in Nepal. We watched a video at work and saw the small village she had transformed from a village with 1 free standing building to a village with a hospital a school and everyone who lived there owning their own homes. i thought wow that's the only way to do business, when you are changing the lives of people who really need and appreciate the change.

So 19 years later after a huge life change i decided to start my own fair trade business. so Beej was born.

Beej means seed in Rajasthani what we do is go into small rural villages in Rajasthan and train women how to do hand embroidery and then they do embroidery I have designed on clothes i have designed. it is so great to work with these women they are so excited about learning and really want to do well.

At the moment I am back in Australia, missing India like crazy and trying to launch Beej here, and looking for retailers to sell the garment so i can keep these wonderful women in work.

So that's it for the moment and I will try to update this blog as often as possible so you can all come on this wonderful journey with me.

peace to you all

meg