The Crafted project has come along at a good time for me. Over the last few years I have made a lot of changes in my creative approach and making practices, working seriously in precious metal jewellery for the first time, and developing new techniques in anodised aluminium. These changes have brought new possibilities to explore, both creatively and in terms of where and how I can sell my work.

So now I need to apply the same kind of innovative thinking to the business side of my work. Am I where I should be and where else can I take this new work? How can I make it pay whilst still keeping my sanity and a personal life? How can I find the time to think and create if the demand for my work continues to grow, particularly when it is handmade by me? I realise my strategic ambitions really haven’t matched up to the creativity and attention I invest in the things I make. Like other craftspeople, I have very little experience of how most businesses operate, and don’t take easily to doing accounts and paperwork. The way I run my business is as much a product of my imagination as the jewellery that I make.

The Crafted project offers a great opportunity to move on. I could not miss the chance of talking to a mentor who was very successful not only in the quality of the products he manufactured but in how he ran and marketed a business which, though it is still small in relative terms, is on a scale way beyond what I could imagine, and growing.

However, the project started just as I was revving up for a heavy Autumn and pre-Christmas programme of orders and exhibitions – Goldsmiths’ Fair, Origin, Dazzle exhibitions in Manchester and London, the Cockpit Open Studios, ‘Art Carat’ at Mayer Goldschmeide in Munich and a solo show at the Scottish Gallery. All of which meant that, up to Christmas, my focus was firmly fixed on my workbench and not on the bigger picture.

I first met my mentor, Alistair Hughes of Savoir Beds, in September. Although his business – handmade beds – has little in common with jewellery, I liked him immediately, finding him positive and empathetic. Although we are still getting to know each other, I find he has a level of ambition – a higher assumption about what is possible – combined with a rational approach.

We have met three times so far this year, and he is urging me to look at how I run my business – to update and improve my systems of accounting and stock control so I get a better picture of what is working and how; and to look and where and how I am showing and selling my work and try some new approaches. All of this takes time but I am realising just how much I need to move forward the areas of my business which underpin my creative work, in order to be able to focus on it more effectively in the long term.