One sunny day in 2017, Kate Jackson, then 61, took a wooden wool-spinning wheel into her garden. She propped her iPad against a brick, pressed record and started talking as she spun – about crafts, the countryside, her menagerie of animals (cats, chickens, bees and Eileen the goose). Jackson enjoyed watching videos about gardening and quilting on YouTube, so one day she thought: how hard can it be? “I made a resolve to upload once a week.”
She called her channel The Last Homely House, “which is a place to feel comfortable, secure and welcomed. That’s what I wanted my channel to be.” It now has 123,000 subscribers. Last May, Jackson – who lives in rural Northumberland – set up a sister channel, called The Last Homely Garden. She has an online shop, nearly 40,000 Instagram followers, and even a fan-run Facebook group. She has become the linchpin of a thriving online community.
Thirteen years ago, after an unexpected divorce and with her three children adults, Jackson found herself living alone. “It was not a future I’d planned,” she says. “I found it hard to reimagine myself.” She left her career as a midwife to focus on selling homemade crafts and teaching workshops, “but I was struggling financially”.
Around this period, her best friend was diagnosed with, and then died from, motor neurone disease. “It was a dark time,” she says. Jackson escaped to New Zealand, where she travelled the country by bus. “I came back healed,” she says; ready to embrace a solo life and find peace in her home.
By the time her village had decent broadband installed in 2017, she was ready to share her little world of artisan pastimes online. In Jackson’s videos, she chats while cooking, sewing, sorting fabrics. Sometimes, she will film a tutorial – but it’s always relaxed. Recently, she has been teaching her daughter-in-law, Anna, how to make a quilt. Jackson eschews polish; she doesn’t like scripting videos and never wears makeup. During one cooking video, she dropped the recipe for the dish she was making in the pan, but kept the mishap in the edit. Her audience loved it, she says. “The comment I get most often is: ‘It’s like sitting having a cup of tea with a friend.’”
Most of her viewers are older American women, who adore this glimpse into English country life. But it’s more than that. “My daughter Martha said: ‘You’re a woman who lives on her own, rurally, and you’re fine.’ Quite often, people are on their own through divorce or death, and it overwhelms them. Whereas I enjoy my solitude and love being able to make my own decisions. I’m showing people it’s all right.”
Her fans collectively call themselves “The Lime Green Sofa”, a concept from lockdown where Jackson imagined her viewers cosied together on an infinite settee. American fans made sofa badges to identify one another at a craft festival. In the UK, Jackson has had people professing their fandom, even “bursting into tears and hugging me. It’s always really friendly and lovely. But a little bit weird.”
While she withholds her exact location, people have also managed to turn up on her doorstep. Online, there are “intrusive questions”. Jackson shares a lot. “But there has to be a point at which you say: ‘No, I’m not going to share this.’” Not least as it protects the privacy of her children and grandchildren.
The Last Homely House has become a family endeavour in other ways, though. Her children and their partners are all creative and get involved by doing bits of work on the channel. They create illustrations, run the online shop, edit videos and photos, and sometimes appear on screen. “Seeing how invested they are in what I’m doing has been an absolute joy,” Jackson says. “It’s a collaboration between the people I love most in my life.”
The channel’s success means Jackson is very busy, but she loves how she spends her time. This year will involve collaborations with YouTubers she once considered heroes, as well as visits to material factories. Success also brings security: “I’m financially independent in a way that never seemed possible when I was down, wondering when I’d sell my next quilt.”
Sometimes she wishes she had started sooner. “But I had to have gone through all those difficult life stages,” she says. “I wouldn’t have appealed to the same people if I’d been younger. I’m doing the right thing, at the right time.”
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