Going into business on Valentine's Day.

Hi! I am a Finnish woman living in the US. My husband is Finnish too and my son has a dual citizenship, he was born here. When we came here, I was on parental leave from my communications job in Finland (we can have pretty long parental leaves, I love it!) and my plan was to return there. BUT a couple of weeks ago I resigned because we are not making it back by the end of my leave. It was a hard thing to do, though, I felt like I had closed my back door!

To help myself not feeling so trapped I decided to start a small business, that I can run from home and do as much or as little as I like. I am taking care of my little son at home and in my free time I like to do crafts, sewing etc. Because some people have been interested in buying them, I decided to start my own business. I registered a trade name, kaiku lifestyle. I did all the paper work today, on Valentine's day.

I am planning to start an Etsy shop very soon. And I am working on my website.

Kaiku means echo. I chose the name because I like to utilize old and recycled materials and make something new out of them. The new product is in a way an echo from the original product that was just going to be thrown away. I use old clothes from our household, from my friends and I buy old fabrics and materials from thrift stores. Sometimes I buy fabric remnants from fabric stores or in very rare cases completely new fabrics if I really like them. I can't resist for instance fabrics from Ikea or Marimekko.

I wanted to start my business as Kaiku design, but someone had already a website under that name. Because I might expand my business later to some other things, I decided to go with Kaiku lifestyle.

I am interested in living as naturally as I can. I have been keeping this blog, Living Naturally in Louisiana. Now we are going to move for a while to California, so I am going to pass the responsibility over the blog and the Living Naturally group to someone else. I will keep writing about the living naturally stuff though in this blog when I have something to say.