Weaving a new name

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Shakespeare’s words, uttered by Juliet, were written to show that the doomed lovers’ names were insignificant in the face of their love, that their devotion to each other would survive the family feuds.

Sadly, we know how their story ends, but name choosing has often been a serious business.

Ask any parent about how and why they named their children - I bet you get chapter and verse about how long it took and how many pitfalls they had to avoid!

So it is with naming a business or creative venture - and I’m no exception.

I have been the face of Yorkshire Wellies for almost six years across Instagram, Facebook, and the blog I began during lockdown.

Life and times change, as they do, and my name had started to not feel right, as if it didn’t fit how I’ve grown and developed over the last few years.

Like a parent who’s grown to dislike the name they gave their own child, I felt incredibly disloyal, almost heartbroken at times, that I didn’t like ‘myself’, my own creation.

Shakespeare says that a name isn’t that deep, that the ‘thing’ will still be itself regardless, but I disagree. Names carry weight, sometimes it’s a hefty one, and I feel shouldn’t be tampered with lightly!

There were times as a child when I intensely disliked my middle name, but I grew to like it again for all the reasons that my parents had chosen it, and am now glad that I didn’t change it as I often wished to growing up.

That said, I got over the feeling that I ‘shouldn’t’ change my creative name, and began exploring the possibilities, which was quite exciting, funnily enough. (More on this process in my next Substack soon!)

Yorkshire Threads feels more fitting for how I’ve grown as a creative, and is more reflective of how my creativity and my own story stretches back to my childhood and incorporates family history - which none of us escapes and which moulds who we are, one way or another.

I’m a Yorkshirewoman through and through, with the added weft of my dad’s Scottish blood, and the trails of my parents’ lives form the base fabric of my own.

The long history of writers in my family - parents, grandparents, and more - further strengthens the weave, to keep the textile analogy going.

Different family members were (and still are) artists, sewers, knitters, crocheters, architects, bakers, photographers, and much more - these creative threads weave many patterns through our generations.

So, Yorkshire Wellies has been re-born as Yorkshire Threads, my own little phoenix. It’s rather exciting and refreshing, and I have SO many ideas bubbling away in my ADHD brain - creative threads linking each to the next!

Come with me, follow along here and on Instagram (search _yorkshire_threads_ )if you’d like pictures as well as words, and let me know your thoughts on names in the comments below here!