WORDS Tara Crutchfield
PHOTOGRAPH Amy Sexson
Jaime Jay Handmade Jaime Jackson is in the business of telling stories. Not through books or songs or poems, but through the wearable art she makes by hand and sells at local markets. She crafts colorful crocheted pieces and handmade jewelry full-time now, but it took many years of hard work to get here.
traveled around the east coast, keeping Central Florida in mind as a destination because her grandparents lived in Winter Haven. The Jacksons settled in Lakeland in 2004. Jaime loved the area’s parks and open spaces. “It seemed perfect like everything was idyllic here,” she said. “Compared to working two full-time jobs each just to pay the rent [in Connecticut].” Life was looking up for the young couple – well, except for all the hurricanes.
A wearable artist for her business Jaime Jay Handmade, she and her husband Eddie and their daughters Juliana and Jalah live in Lakeland. Eddie is the frontman for Fire Light Reggae and a fourth-grade math and science teacher. “If you’re an artist, you need someone to cheer you on,” she said of husband Eddie. “I see the good and brilliance in him when he’s feeling low, and he sees the good and brilliance in me when I’m feeling low.”
“We fell in love with it here. I liked the feeling of not quite fitting in and being challenged,” she said. Coming from a place back home where she had an extensive community network, Jaime liked the feeling of being the new kid in town. “I felt like I could dig in and maybe throw my energy towards a place where it was at a tipping point.” She and Eddie liked the prospect of ‘making the community you want to be in.’
The couple cultivates creativity at home, encouraging their daughters to explore outlets that interest them. Youngest daughter Jalah is creative with makeup, nail polish, hair color, and accessories. She is also known to curate a mean music playlist. Older daughter Juliana is an anime artist who knits, crochets, and plays the violin.
JAIME JAY TAKES FLIGHT “I had to keep crossing new thresholds before I found myself with the time and space to focus just on my business,” said Jackson. She got her nickname and now business name, Jaime Jay (for Jackson), when she worked for Hobby Lobby for eight years. “I started there during the economic downturn when there were no jobs to be had. I waited in line, three different days, for two hours a day to be interviewed. I kept coming back because I really needed a job,” she said.
CREATE, CROCHET, REPEAT Jaime Jackson grew up in a small New England dairy cow town. “I remember being in first grade and being in the Brownies and the Girl Scouts and doing craft time, and that being my favorite thing. She would often craft with her grandmother too. “She taught me how to crochet and knit and sew,” said Jackson. She described her Nonna as “a typical Italian grandmother” who made crafts out of even the smallest things. “She never looked at a bottle of bleach that she didn’t have to cut apart and make into something,” Jackson smiled.
She landed the position, all the while finding time for her art, even bringing supplies to work with her to crochet during breaks. A turning point for Jackson was when she got passed up for a promotion. “I was told it would be better if I didn’t try to get a promotion there because I had a family to take care of.” The job was given to a man instead. That was her sign that working in corporate retail was not a fit for her life. She and Eddie sat down and came up with a long-term plan. He wanted to go back to college for a teaching degree, and she wanted to create and sell her art.
The first time she was paid to make something was friendship bracelets when she was twelve. She quickly moved from her first love of weaving to making other jewelry. She was selling a few pieces here and there by high school and making them for friends and family as gifts. “I always used selling my artwork as a way to get the extras in life,” she said. In her teens, she decided she wanted to get out of that small town. She would venture to the city of New Haven, Connecticut, to go to museums and teen clubs. At 18, she enrolled in community college, moved out, and got an apartment of her own. She worked at a restaurant, a bead store, and sold the jewelry she made to support herself. “I never stopped hustling from that moment – from the moment I moved out,” she said.
As soon as Eddie got his degree, he began teaching mid-way through the school year in 2019. At the end of that school year, on her daughters’ last day of school and Eddie’s last day teaching for the year, she quit her job at Hobby Lobby. She was ready to take flight with Jaime Jay Handmade. The name came not only from her nickname, but she began noticing all the birds in her backyard bird feeder and liked the symbolism. Jaime Jay was a name she felt connected to.
She met her husband, Eddie, and the two worked together to make ends meet. “I had this peaceful, tranquil childhood, but then my young adulthood was running to keep the lights on, to keep the heat on. It was hard,” she said.
She planned to teach craft classes and sell jewelry initially. The family converted their back porch into an airy studio with two walls of windows and double doors opening to their dining room. “It’s a quiet, colorful room in our house where people go and have conversations and sit down and relax,” she said. She spends most of her time in the studio. “It looks out into the backyard. I get to watch the birds and the trees and the sky. It’s everything I wanted.”
The strain of working to make ends meet and attending college became too great, and Jackson eventually dropped out of school. After a tough winter during which the couple struggled “to heat our apartment that we hated living in, in a neighborhood we didn’t enjoy,” Jaime thought, “That’s it. I’m done.” The couple
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