Megan Leyman

For those who don’t know, for nearly 10 years I had a small printing business called Bonfirecherry, which produced products using the hand printing method called linocut.

I learnt some skills while I was studying Art & Design/Graphic design at Northampton college many years ago and then learnt the rest of the skills myself. It was great getting my ideas out there in some sort of art.

All fun and all doing this but how am I going to make some money from this?

Well the best way of selling was/still is via social media which I was used to by the time I started Bonfirecherry (I discovered Twitter while in college before it was mainstream and known by everyone) and I made sure to use it when the time came to start Bonfirecherry as a small business.

From 2015 ^

When the business is just you doing everything, of course bits of your personal life will spill into what I posted about.

While writing this up, I’ve just remembered doing a fair just around the corner where I live many years ago and a customer thought I was a girl because of what I posted about because at times I was tweeting about a few things that sounded girly I think.

This was years before I actually came out as Megan, at times I did post about myself and at times I think (this is years ago I can’t really remember the details too much) I must have shown pics of myself crossdressed to give people that idea.

If this affected my sales, I will never know.

I mainly ran Bonfirecherry as a fun way of getting my ideas out there, of course I liked the sales but never was able to get a full time job out if it due to the sales of prints (its not something you buy every month) which was a bummer, but at least I had people really like the work I did, one of them i did as a commission for a wedding, which you can see above.

From a christmas fair in 2022 as Megan ^

So to answer the point of this post, not much really changed because I was still me and didn’t really affect my designs too much.

I think I wanted to do more feminine designs because 70% of my customer audience was female but don’t really think it was because of me wanting to change my gender but maybe it was subconscious I can’t say.

With that, I end the post,

Thanks for reading!

Huge thanks to Khandie Photography for taking the picture I am using the main image for the post, it was taken in October 2020