Hey guys! This is quite a different post to our usual content. We’ve recently gone through quite a big change in our lives, and subsequently, our blog suffered a bit because of it. Seeing as so many of you have followed our blog and supported us over the past year and a half, we felt we owed it to you to explain why we went awol over the summer, what we’ve been up to, and what our plans are moving forward.
Back in January, we decided we wanted to leave London and move back to our hometown; Bristol. The idea of moving had been on our minds for quite some time before we finally committed, but it wasn’t something we’d anticipated happening as soon as it did! We were pretty settled in London. Our lives were relatively stable, we both had good careers we were building and loads of great friends who we love dearly. However, something wasn’t working for us. London was never going to be somewhere we stayed forever. We were getting tired of the speed of it all and could feel it catching up with us more and more as the months rolled past. The dangerous levels of pollution, the increasing rent prices that would’ve seen us pushed out of our home in North London, and the distance from our families, were amongst lots of other reasons why London just wasn’t the place for us anymore. Of course, we had so many amazing experiences there, and it’s still such a special place for us both, but it was time for a change.
It’s now been three months since we moved out of London, and for the first two months, we moved in with Charlie’s family in Bristol while we were looking for flats. It’s been just over a month since we moved into our new place, and we couldn’t love it more! There are still lots of things we’d like to do to it over the coming months, but we’re happy with where it’s at now. It’s a home that feels like ours. It was a daunting decision when we finally decided to move. We constantly questioned if we were making the right decision. We wondered if we’d jumped the gun and left too soon and should’ve hung on until we were in our 30s, as that seemed to be the thing to do. Being freelancers, moving also made looking for work that much more tricky as we’re having to build new networks from scratch again. Despite the worries, we’re both so happy we made the jump and finally feel settled in Bristol. We’ve now got a second bedroom/office, which is a dedicated space for creating blog content. It’s SO much better than our last set up, so we’re super grateful for that!
We do occasionally reminisce back to our little flat in Finsbury Park and feel a bit sad for what we left behind. It was such a big upheaval, and our lives were pretty comfortable back in London. We needed to shake things up though and change is definitely a good thing! It can still be hard to know if we made the right decision at times, but for us, all we need to do is meet up with family or go for a walk in the country and everything feels alright again. In London, we felt so distanced from both our families and nature, so having access to these things in life again makes everything worth it.
Because we’ve been a bit displaced over the past few months, we really struggled to keep up with our schedule of posting once a week. All our stuff was in storage and split between family houses and we were spending all our spare time flat hunting. Missing posts each week made us feel guilty as we thought people were expecting content from us, but as soon as we decided to let it go and just resume when we were settled, it felt like the right decision. We really missed creating content though and taking a break made us realise just how important Lovely Jubley is to us. Coming back to it after this hiatus has given us newfound energy and determination to create great content for you all, and hopefully make a tiny difference in the world. If we could encourage just one person to eat slightly less meat each week, or help a new vegan in finding their feet, then we’d feel like we’d made a difference.
We’ve been posting on here for nearly a year and a half and we’ve learnt so much about blogging in that time. It’s definitely not as easy as we thought it would be! Keeping up with weekly blog posts, daily Instagram content, plus all the other hours spent recipe testing, researching, developing and just generally trying to grow is practically a second job! In that time, we’ve moved house and city from London to Bristol, I graduated from university and we’re both turning 26. I know, not really a big milestone, but we are definitely feeling the approach to 30 and the pressures that come with getting older! We’ve gone through highs and lows, yet Lovely Jubley has always been a constant for us, always there as something to focus and work on. As freelancers, Lovely Jubley started as a way of filling our spare time. We wanted a project we could do together and invest our skills into. It’s become so much more for us. To date, we’ve not made a single penny from Lovely Jubley. This blog is a total passion project that’s kept alive because we love it! However, it can be difficult at times when producing content for the internet. It sometimes feels like we’re putting stuff out there without really knowing if it ever reaches an audience. I’m sure a lot of bloggers starting out think this way too, and luckily we have you! We’ve had so much support and encouragement from both friends and family, but also complete strangers too that have just discovered our blog somewhere on the internet. We’re so grateful to all of you!! We love getting feedback or hearing that someone has tried our recipes and enjoyed them! It really does make all the hours of work worth it.
Moving into the future we have a lot of aspirations for what we want Lovely Jubley to become. In the future, we would love to open a vegan cafe, a space that’s community-focused and welcoming to everyone. Most importantly it would serve up some delicious vegan food! In the not so distant future, we are starting to think about how we can make money with Lovely Jubley. We’ve learned a lot of skills along the way and are starting to create a business offering our services as food photographers and stylists, as well as general content creators. As for the blog, we are striving to share more of our lives here. We want to invite you in so you can get to know us as people, and hopefully, we’ll get to know you, our beautiful readers, too! We’re constantly trying to find new ways to reduce our carbon footprint, we’re passionate about the environment and love sharing sustainable and eco-friendly products that we love and use. We’re going to be redesigning our blog so it works faster and looks better, and exploring other avenues such as creating e-books, recipe cards and lots of other exciting things! Our goals are both simple and complex and often we can lose sight of where we’re going, the easiest way of putting it is that we want to grow. We want to grow and learn as content producers, we want to grow our audience, we want to grow Lovely Jubley from this little vegan corner of the internet into a self-sustaining business!
We’ve always wanted to make our blog more personal, but sometimes it’s hard to know where to start, and how much information to share with people. We love getting to know our favourite bloggers and vloggers and getting a glimpse into their lives. I guess it’s human nature to have an interest in what other people are doing. We love sharing our recipes and other tips from our vegan kitchen, but we’ve always wanted to share more of the other aspects of our lives with you. When we first started this blog, we were both quite apprehensive about writing our thoughts on the internet for everyone to read. What would people think of us? Would we be judged for things? Would people think we were being weird? Over time, writing recipes and restaurant reviews have become second nature to us, and thankfully, we’ve stopped caring about what people think of us so much. As long as we’re posting content that we’re proud of, that’s all that matters to us! However, we realised that although we thought we were being pretty open with you guys, we haven’t shared much about ourselves beyond our thoughts on veganism. Of course, we’re both super passionate about veganism, but we have other things going on in our life, and we’d love to share more of that with you. This post is hopefully the first of many more to come. We plan on doing quarterly updates over the year through each new season. This way we’ll have a space in which we can reflect over the past few months and share our goals for the coming months. We really hope you enjoy this new series of posts and finding out a bit more about us and our lives.
We’d love to know if you enjoyed this post and what kind of things you’d like to see on our blog going forward. Let us know in the comments below, or on any of our social media channels!