Just ‘decor,’ no ‘um’ An irreverent thing happened on the way to law school for Swan River's Chelsey Palmer, whose sly, sharp-tongued home furnishings are a huge hit By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, May. 8, 2021 Last Modified: 9:08 AM CDT Saturday, May. 8, 2021 Updates

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/05/2021 (1634 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What a difference a year makes.

Last Mother’s Day, Chelsey Palmer, owner of Jagged Little Pillows, an online store toasting its fifth anniversary, sold a slew of gifts bearing the sentiment, “Home is where your mom is.”

Twelve months later, the Swan River entrepreneur’s No. 1 bestseller is a tad more succinct: a stemmed wine glass that reads — pardon her French — “Mother of the f—ing year.”

“I figured that was a good one for COVID. It just kind of sums everything up, wouldn’t you agree?” muses Palmer, whose line of home furnishings is often as saucy as it is chic.

Palmer, in her early 30s, doesn’t hesitate when asked the obligatory, chicken-or-egg query: which came first, the notion to found a venture featuring hand-sewn, fashion pillows as the star attraction, or her livelihood’s name, a play on Canadian singer Alanis Morissette’s mega-hit album Jagged Little Pill, released in 1995?

“Definitely the name; it just kind of came to me out of the blue one day and I thought it’d be an amusing name for a business, even though I’m not some massive Morissette fan like everybody naturally assumes,” replies Palmer, “mom” to two cats, Gin and Tonic, who met with the Free Press during a recent trip to Winnipeg to pick up the newest addition to her family, a golden retriever pup that goes by Orzo.

“To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really expect this to turn into an actual, honest-to-God ‘thing.’ If I had, I probably would have gone with something that doesn’t make it sound like all I sell is pillows. But since I didn’t, I guess I’m stuck with it, right?”

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OK, here’s another question: what’s a nice, small-town gal like Palmer doing selling pillows and cushions emblazoned with cheeky sayings such as “I love your stupid face” and “Well, s–t,” not to mention woven doormats that read, “Real friends bring wine” and (our favourite) “Did you call first?”

The answer begins at the University of Calgary, where the Swan Valley Regional Secondary School alumnus majored in philosophy, with an eye toward law school. A funny thing happened on the way to the bar exam, however: after taking a few visual arts courses as electives in her second year of studies, Palmer found herself moving more in that direction.

“I had a really great professor who got me super interested in printmaking, particularly a technique called Intaglio, which is hundreds of years old,” says Palmer, who had just been accepted into a four-year, interior design course, again at the U of C, in 2016 when her father died unexpectedly.

An only child, she returned to Swan River to comfort her mother Jewel and help around the house any way she could. Around that same time, a close friend of hers had a baby girl. Comfortable with a sewing machine thanks to her paternal grandmother, she fashioned a personalized throw pillow that listed the child’s name, birthday and weight at birth. Moments after its recipient posted pics of the keepsake online, Palmer was inundated with requests from other new moms for something similar.

To save time, she eventually purchased a plotter, a digital device employed by graphic artists to cut out shapes and letters from sheets of vinyl, which can then be heat-transferred to a variety of surfaces and materials. She branched out from so-called “baby info pillows” to ones bearing whatever random expression popped into her head, some endearing (“You are my sunshine,” “Dream big little one”), others not so much (“Wish you were beer”).

By the fall of 2016, she’d built up enough of an inventory to rent a table at a Christmas craft show held annually at Swan River’s Elbert Chartrand Friendship Centre. Sure, a few eyebrows were raised by specimens that were more naughty than nice (Yes, Virginia, there was a Santa Claus pillow carrying the inscription, “The tree isn’t the only thing getting lit this year”). By the end of the weekend, mind you, after every last pillow she’d brought along had been scooped up, she was pretty confident she had a hit on her hands.

“It all kind of built from there. I started doing more and more shows, not only in and around Swan River, but also in Winnipeg and Brandon, and as far west as Alberta and B.C.,” she says, noting she bought a Boler trailer two years ago that had seen better days, which she gutted and refurbished and now uses to transport her lot from place to place. (”Sometimes I wish I was selling cookies or perogies, pillows take up a ton of room,” she says with a wink.)

Fabriculous, a fabric store in Swan River, was one of the first retail outlets to carry Jagged Little Pillows merchandise. Owner Wendy van der Walt, whose husband was Palmer’s graphic design teacher in high school (“He’d like to think he was a big influence,” she says with a laugh), stocks Palmer’s regular line along with sewing- and crafting-themed items Palmer creates specifically for the store, the most popular being a coffee mug that reads, “(Eff) off, I’m sewing!”

“We proudly display all her items with their irreverent charm,” van der Walt says. “However, I might ‘fluff’ the pillows and turn the captions to the back when I’m in doubt about a newcomer’s views.

“In the ‘before times’ Chelsey and I — well, mostly Chelsey — co-ordinated fabulous, local maker sales in our building, a huge, renovated church, with live musical entertainment, signature cocktails and unique merchandise,” she continues. “We are sure hoping those days return in the not-too-distant future.”

In the past 12 months Palmer, who, through her website (www.jaggedlittlepillows.com), has shipped product to customers from coast to coast, has added handsewn scrunchies, lavender-and-flax-seed eye pillows and non-medical facemasks, each one more playful than the last, to her repertoire. As for her bread and butter, she recently introduced a new summer line of pillows that, at first glance, appears more — dare we say it? — grown-up than what she’s turned out previously.

“I’m kind of branching out a bit, keeping an eye on new trends, what’s popular in home stores, that kind of thing,” she says, agreeing her new, “mature” cushions are less off-colour and more, well, colourful. “I’m not giving up on my funny ones altogether — there are a few classics I’ve always had and always will — but I find as my business grows, I want to make my brand a bit more specific by maybe not having 50 pillows with 50 different sayings, which can make it hard to keep up sometimes.”

One person hoping Palmer never parks her sassy side completely is Shyy Kennedy, owner of Buck + Doe in Kenora. Kennedy, whose beauty and wellness studio carries Canadian-made products exclusively with an accent on female-owned enterprises, was already selling what she refers to as “sweary candles” when, two years ago, a customer of hers shared the link to Palmer’s website. Her immediate reaction: “I have to have her items in stock.”

“We carried some pillows that were huge sellers but decided to stick with her ‘coffee slut,’ ‘tea slut’ and ‘wine slut’ cups and mugs; we cannot keep them in stock,” she says when reached at home. “We also order her custom socks at Christmas and of course, the salty ones fly off the shelves.”

Not 100 per cent sure, but we believe she’s referring to a mismatched pair of socks that read, “Baby it’s cold” on one, and “AF outside” on the other.

Ordinarily at this time of year, Palmer, who often retreats to a family cottage near Wellman Lake to sew, would be preparing to hit the road to sell her wares here, there and everywhere. And while markets she’s attended in the past sound like they’ll be up and running in the days and weeks ahead, her plan is to stay home for the foreseeable future.

“I know it’s a touchy subject but my take is I’m not doing any shows until I feel it’s OK to do so,” she says. “Personally, I don’t think it’s socially responsible of me to do that, plus my mother and I are my grandparents’ main caregivers — we took them for their first vaccination shots just the other day — and if they ever got sick because I was out selling pillows, I’d never forgive myself.”

On a lighter note, Palmer, who still has designs on studying law one day, shakes her head when asked whether her Instagram persona — that of a negligee-wearing, wine-drinking, F-bomb-dropping bon vivant who does little but lounge around on pillows day in day out — is a reflection of her true self.

“No, a lot of those shoots are actually a bit outside my comfort zone,” she says with a chuckle. “That said, if there was ever a better time to pour yourself a drink, build a giant pillow fort and crawl inside, I don’t know when that would be.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca

 

Mixin’ it up with the best

Last month, we introduced you to Angel’s Share Cocktail Co., a year-old business that markets small-batch, non-alcoholic craft cocktail mixes prepared with all-natural ingredients.

A little over a week after that story ran, two Angel’s Share products came up big at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, an annual event that regularly attracts more than 3,000 entrants from every corner of the globe.

“It was our first foray into the competition so we only entered two products, our take on the classic Tiki cocktail, the Zombie, as well as our original cocktail Jus de Carotte,” says Shane Masters, who runs Angel’s Share with his fiancée Marie-Pier Racine. “Both were entered in the Specialty Cocktail Mixers class, with the Zombie taking a silver (medal) and the Jus de Carotte taking a gold.”

Masters says he and Racine, who launched their biz in May 2020, had the competition date circled on the calendar for a while. Both were curious to see how their “humble, hand-made products” would measure up against larger companies that had been turning out craft cocktail mixes for years.

“Maybe in hindsight we didn’t fully appreciate what a medal would mean, but we’re still finding ourselves picking our jaws up off the floor when we think about it,” he says.

If you’re curious, the gold medal-winning Jus de Carotte mix, available on the couple’s website (www.angelssharecocktailco.com) can be served over ice as a mocktail, or paired with your favourite gin, Masters adds.

— Dave Sanderson