The other part of Carola Jones, Teaching Artist LLC, is my work as a small-business Internet Technologies consultant. At first glance, teaching someone how to create a website might seem far removed from dyeing cloth with indigo. I don’t see them as separate anymore. Small business owners often know how to make something, provide a service, or serve their communities. What they don’t always know is how to translate that knowledge into a digital presence. That is another kind of creative translation.

Through workshops and individual consulting, I help small business owners understand tools for websites, visual communication, digital marketing, content development, and online storytelling. I teach people how to make technology work for their businesses, rather than letting it dictate what their businesses should become. That philosophy isn’t very different from the way I teach textiles. Start with what you have. Learn the tools. Experiment. Make mistakes. Solve problems. Tell your own story. Make something that belongs to you.

A Business Plan That Looks More Like Me

Traditional business planning can lead us to believe that everything needs to fit neatly into separate boxes. Artist. Writer. Teacher. Consultant. YouTuber. Retailer. But my creative life doesn’t work that way. It looks more like a quilt. Some pieces came from my mother. Some came from my grandmother. Some came from classrooms. Some came from computers. Some came from indigo vats. Some came from grief. Some came from starting over.

Writing is helping me spread those pieces across the table and finally see the pattern. The revised structure is becoming much clearer:

Carola Jones, Teaching Artist LLC
The legal business and professional umbrella for my creative, educational, and consulting work.

Fiber Art by Carola — DBA
The artist brand and store where I market and sell the one-of-a-kind Indigenous Geechee medicine cloth and textile work I create.

Stitching Culture
The book where I document the stories, processes, cultural knowledge, creative research, and lived experiences behind the work.

Three names. Three different purposes. One interconnected creative practice.

Writing the Next Chapter

There is something wonderfully appropriate about discovering my new business structure while writing. Creative writing asks me to remove what doesn’t belong. It asks me to find the strongest image. It asks me to pay attention to repetition. It asks me to notice the thread running beneath everything. Apparently, those are useful business skills too. I’m no longer trying to build several businesses around everything I know how to do.

I’m building Carola Jones, Teaching Artist LLC around the artist who does them. Fiber Art by Carola gives me a place to sell what my hands make. Stitching Culture gives me a place to tell the stories behind those hands.

And Carola Jones, Teaching Artist LLC gives me the structure to keep teaching, whether I am sitting beside a sewing machine, standing beside an indigo vat, helping a middle schooler discover the mathematics hidden inside a quilt square, or showing a small business owner how to put their first website online. Maybe that is what creative writing is teaching me about entrepreneurship: A good business, like a good story, needs a strong thread running through it. I finally know what mine is.