“When the pandemic hit, I lost all my work pretty much overnight,” says Gemma Griffin, 43, from Suffolk. “I’m a knitwear designer. I’d worked for various UK high street brands since leaving university, then I went freelance three years ago.” When Covid arrived, Griffin hadn’t been self-employed for long enough to qualify for government funding. She was also living in a new house and caring for her eight-year-old daughter. “I really, really needed something else to do,” she says.
She decided to use the time to renovate her home. “My dad was a painter and decorator, so I’ve always been used to getting on with home projects,” she says. “We’d just moved in and there was some disrepair, so I wanted to see what I could do.”
