About five years ago, Josie Gates relocated to Albuquerque with her two sons, then still in school, from Tom’s River, New Jersey, because of her job as a web designer. She is the proprietor of Blue Flower Full Moon (etsy.com/shop/BlueFlowerFullMoon), an Etsy shop that specializes in spiritual and metaphysical items. To meet demand, Blue Flower has purchased a laser cutter and has on eye on the goal of open a brick and mortar storefront. However, this was not the plan not so long ago.Josie did not seek out FUSE makerspace. She was looking for a way to improve her abilities as a web designer. She found CNM Ingenuity’s Deep Dive Coding programs and signed up for their mailing list. In one of the newsletters was a blurb about FUSE’s laser box making class. She had wanted to make a box for her tarot cards, and this would be a way to do so. The Blue Flower Etsy page was mostly dormant until the pandemic when Josie began to offer facemasks on it. She had known how to sew since high school but had not actively used her sewing machine since then either. Josie took out her old sewing machine, and after a brief refresher and a stop by Youtube, she began producing masks. A side effect of the high demand for face mask was a lot of new eyes were on her other products. These additional products have proven pretty popular while being interviewed for this short article we were interrupted by several orders.One of the popular products Blue Flower sells is a portable pendulum board, about the size of a credit card. A pendulum board is an object with several possible answers to a question written on it, and whichever the pendulum points to is supposed to be the best answer. She continues to design and add new products to the shop, all of which are reflections of her spirituality.Josie is also a veteran of the US Army, like her parents and much of her extended family. When her mother passed away, she was presented with three shells from the twenty-one-gun salute. One of her current projects is creating shadow boxes to commemorate these shells for family members of military veterans.While she is still a web designer and has been since the mid-nineties, she hopes that Blue Flower Full moon will continue to grow into something that will soon be her new full-time job.
