For Melissa McKeagney, there’s nothing like creating art and putting it on repeat.

The Wilmot resident has been a textile artist for fifteen years, but until recently, she’d been creating with other people’s prints. Now her company, Studio Buue, sells not only handmade children’s clothing, accessories, and home decor, but also one-of-a-kind prints designed by McKeagney herself.

“It can be hard to do the same things over and over, but if you’re doing it with your own fabrics and prints, it gives you the boost you need,” McKeagney said via phone.

The opportunity to expand her business came about in 2020 when travel ceased and her day job as a flight attendant took a hit. Her employer, Delta Air Lines, offered employees the option to take a leave of absence in lieu of having to lay people off. She took it.

The leave allowed McKeagney to dream about where to bring her company next. She’d always wanted to create her own prints but there was never the time. Now, all of a sudden, she had oodles of it.

“For a year, I wasn’t traveling at all, so I had this time to devote to taking online classes in Photoshop and Illustrator to learn how to do this,” she said.

That’s not to say the jump-in was easy. When McKeagney learned about a workshop from an artist she follows and admires, Sarah Watts, she hesitated to register — was she good enough? She didn’t have a regular drawing practice. Being self-taught, she wondered whether she had enough training.

“It took me the entire week, almost to the last day of enrollment, for me to be like, you know what, I’m doing it. And I took to it like a fish to water. It felt exactly like something I should have been doing all along,” McKeagney said.

It’s the boost she needed to move forward with her business, which had already evolved significantly since she started it fifteen years ago when she couldn’t find clothes she liked for her young daughter, whose favorite color was blue. She decided to start making them herself.

At the time, it wasn’t far-fetched to imagine she could sew something better than what was on the rack, having come from a long line of artistic women — painters, decorators, seamstresses, crafters, and fashion designers. As a girl, she remembers her mother wearing a gown of goosefeathers designed by her aunt to a gubernatorial ball. Fashion and creativity were in her blood.

“I’ve always been around creative women and makers. I love making stuff. It doesn’t matter what it is — it’s always been fun for me,” McKeagney said via phone. “When I had my own child, naturally, it wasn’t a big leap to say, you know what, I’m going to do this myself.”

It took little time for McKeagney’s clothing to garner attention. People came up to her, admiring the handiwork on her daughter’s garments, wondering where she’d purchased them. Her company, Little Girl Pearl, was born.

McKeagney’s daughter is a teenager now, and the business has expanded to include not just children’s clothing, but also purses, scarves, accessories, and home decor items. Her prints are available on Spoonflower, a print on-demand site that offers the option to purchase different designs on fabric, wallpaper, bedding and pillows.

To honor the business’s origins and evolution, McKeagney recently renamed her company to Buue Studio — how her daughter used to pronounce her favorite color, blue. She still plans to make things by hand, but this new design element allows more opportunities for Buue Studio to grow.

“When you’re a one-girl show, you’re really limited on how many dresses you can create. It’s all handmade, so it takes a lot of time. But with the prints and patterns, it’s one-and-done,” she said.

It also allows her greater opportunity to express herself creatively. She loves saturated, bold tones, and mixing patterns together in unexpected ways. For her, inspiration is all around, from the Red-Spotted Newts in her backyard to the Portuguese tile patterns she saw during her travels.

Next on McKeagney’s agenda: Surtex, a surface design and art licensing trade show in New York this May, followed by the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen Fair in Sunapee, which she says takes months to get ready for.

Her goal for the new year is to become a licensed artist, even if it’s just for one design. For her, there’s something very personal about creating prints, involving memories and storytelling, life experiences and her own unique perspective. To see her first print collection, “Dreams of Gram’s House,” in person made her happy beyond belief.

“It was all about the memories I had of spending time at their house in Florida,” she said. “It was exactly what I’d hoped it would be.”

You can learn more about her and her company at buuestudio.com.

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