How I fit a creative side hustle around full-time work, two kids, and a very full life

A typical Tuesday for me: up early, make lunches, get my two kids out the door for school drop-off, then straight into my work-from-home job for the day. At 3pm I'm back in the car, my daughter has dance, my son has footy training, and by the time we're home, I finish work, dinner's needed, baths happen, and then it's bedtime. By 8:30pm, I have maybe an hour and a half before I hit a wall.

That's the window. That's where the side business lives.

I want to be honest about what it actually looks like to build a creative side hustle on the side of a life that is already genuinely full. Not aspirationally full. Actually full.

Working from home doesn't mean free time for my creative side-hustle

This is the thing people always get wrong when I mention I work from home. There's an assumption, sometimes from people I know, sometimes in my own head, that working from home means flexibility, gaps in the day, stolen hours to sketch or create. It doesn't. The hours I have during the day are for my job. That's what makes it a job.

So I had to stop waiting for the day to give me something it was never going to give me, and get creative about the edges instead.

The 8:30pm window, yes. But also: a lunch break spent jotting down colour ideas in my sketchbook instead of doom-scrolling. Ten minutes in the car before school pickup, thinking through a collection concept. Saturday mornings sometimes, or a quiet hour at a café on a weekend while my partner holds things together at home.

Little pockets of time, treated seriously, add up to something. That's the whole thing. That's the secret, if there is one. The creative getaway (and what to do if that's not an option for you)

I'm lucky I have a really supportive husband. Every couple of months, I float the idea of going away for two nights on my own, what I've started calling a 'creative getaway'. A cheap Airbnb somewhere quiet, no agenda, just time and space to design without interruption.

This is my last 'creative gateway'. I stayed at this really cool refurbished motel called 'The Monty' in Anglesea. The surroundings were my biggest inspiration.

Those two nights produced more than six weeks of evenings. Not because I'm more talented when I'm away, but because the conditions are different. There's no transition cost, no switching from dinner to bath time to creative mode. I just get to be in it.

But I know this isn't an option for everyone, and I don't want to write a post that assumes it is. If you don't have that support at home right now, the same principle applies at a smaller scale: a library on a Saturday morning. A café table with your sketchbook. Sitting outside somewhere for an hour while the kids are at sport. The location isn't magic. The uninterrupted time is what you're after, and you can find versions of it in a lot of places.

This is a pattern I created at my 'cretive gateway' in Anglesea. It's available to purchase at my Spoonflower Shop.

Learning things properly, because I couldn't afford to learn inefficiently

One of the best decisions I made early on was to stop cobbling things together from random free content and actually learn surface pattern design properly. Not because I had more time for a course, I had less time than anyone, but because I didn't have time to go down the wrong paths.

I enrolled in Cass Deller's surface pattern design course*, and the thing I valued most about it was that it gave my small windows of time direction. When you only have an hour, you can't spend twenty minutes of it figuring out what you should be doing. Having a structured path meant I could open my laptop, pick up where I left off, and actually make progress in the time I had.

One thing I'll say about the course: Cass is a brilliant teacher. I came in much more comfortable in Illustrator, but most of my work is hand-painted, and Illustrator just wasn't the right tool for where I wanted to go. I'd been putting off learning Photoshop properly for ages. Cass made it click. I finished the course actually confident in Photoshop, not just functional, confident, and now building patterns from my painted work feels natural in a way it never did before.

I'm an affiliate for the course, which means I earn a small commission if you sign up through my link. I only share things I'm genuinely using, and this is one of them.

If you don't want to do the full course, Cass also offers a great Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator course for beginners. You will find it HERE*. I also have a special 10% offer on Cass's courses if you're interested, click below to get the code.

GET 10% OFF THE COURSES

I'm not in a hurry, and that's changed everything

The other shift that's made this sustainable: I've genuinely let go of the timeline.

Spoonflower, the platform I sell my designs on, rewards consistency over time. The more designs you have, the more the algorithm works in your favour. That's a slow build. It's measured in months and years, not weeks. And I've made peace with that, because the alternative, burning myself out trying to upload constantly while also doing drop-offs and pickups and dance recitals and footy games and an actual job, isn't a life I want.

I'm not trying to replace my income by next year. I'm actually really enjoying my day job. I'm trying to build something that still exists, and still earns, in five years. That reframe has made everything feel more manageable.

If you're somewhere in the middle of this, full-time work, kids, a creative thing you're trying to nurture, I hope something in here is useful. Not because I've worked it all out, but because I'm in it too, trying to find the time where I can, letting go of the guilt when I can't.

And if you're thinking about learning surface pattern design properly, this is the course I'd point you to*. It was the right fit for where I was: limited time, wanting to learn well, not wanting to waste either. * Affiliate link, I earn a small commission if you purchase through this link, at no extra cost to you. I only recommend things I use and believe in.