The Little Girl Who Drew the Fairy Shop

Aimee is a Sydney maker, a mother, and the keeper of quite a lot of fairy magic.

When she was eight or nine she made a pamphlet for a shop that didn’t exist. She called it the wonder wing fairy shop, and she drew it with the seriousness only a child can bring to imaginary things. A small business plan for a dream she didn’t yet have the language to name.

Decades later, in a studio in Darlinghurst, that pamphlet finally has its shop.

“Somehow the journey of my life brought me back to that childhood dream. I like to think that I’m making the pieces little me imagined but hands couldn’t yet create.”

Every stitch was always becoming the seam

Between then and now there was art school in Sydney. A rather fancy children’s boutique, where she first saw how creative you could be with the things small humans wear. Window dressing. Bridal. A milliner who taught her how a hat is built. Then a friend with a children’s clothing label asked Aimee to hand-make some accessories, and quietly encouraged her to start her own.

Every job turned out to be practice for this one.

A making day

Her days begin the way most mothers’ days begin. Coffee, half-drunk. The particular small chaos of getting little humans dressed, fed and located. “Many days start with coffee, and the general chaos of getting my kids ready for daycare and school. Socks on shoes on… socks still not on?!”

Then drop-off, and the doors close. She drives to her studio, where the chaos of home gives way to the quieter chaos of making.

The compulsion

Aimee is the kind of person who cannot rest when she isn’t making. Who packs a sewing machine for a holiday just in case. Who feels unsettled without a pen and paper within reach. “For most creative people, making isn’t really a choice. It’s a compulsion.”

She’s a country girl raised in the city, and the wildness still lives in her. Most days she walks through the park or finds water to swim in, less a luxury than maintenance.

Worth that hides in the quiet

When the thing you love becomes the thing you live on, the days take on weight.

“The good days can make you feel like you can achieve anything. The quiet days can make you question your worth.”

There were 4am alarms, missed weekends, yeses given out of fear. She’d attached her worth to her output and the maths caught up with her. “All it got me was complete creative burnout.”

A reclaiming

What changed was how she measures it. “I have reassessed what success is to me. Sometimes I need to remind myself that I get to decide how my little business works.”

These days, when the well runs dry, she doesn’t push. She walks through galleries. She visits craft markets and lets other makers’ hands inspire her own. She makes the things she already knows how to make, quiet repetitive work that lets the brain rest while the hands keep moving. “Another idea always comes along. That’s the best thing about being born a maker.”

Don’t be afraid

If there is a small business living inside you, a dream stitched into the corner of your evenings, Aimee encourages:

“Don’t be afraid to start. Don’t be afraid to learn. Don’t be afraid to build something and have a go at living off what you do, if that’s your dream.”

Take what you make seriously. Do the market and watch how people respond to your work, less for the validation than for the conversation. Let yourself be a beginner. Let yourself try. “If what you create stirs something in you, it will in others too.”

Made to be held onto

“I would love for my pieces to bring a rush of nostalgia. A memory of childhood back. A little feeling of that magic.”

Then the wings leave the studio and the parcel finds its child. Somewhere, in a home Aimee will never see, a small person puts on a pair of fairy wings and feels, for the first time, what magic feels like.