De­siree McEachrane

Adeiye Ay­o­dele Pil­grim be­lieves firm­ly in the pow­er of the per­son­al touch. She named her hand-made card busi­ness af­ter her­self, Ay­o­dele, which means 'brings joy to the home' in Yoru­ba. "I thought it was fit­ting since cards do that as well," the lithe 23-year-old said. She'd been dab­bling with mak­ing cards since she was six years old and print­ing them out on her home com­put­er to sell at church. "It was kind of mer­ce­nary, sell­ing cards in church," she said, laugh­ing. Pil­grim stopped do­ing any­thing cre­ative for about 15 years, while she went to a high school, pur­sued 10 CXC sub­jects and A'lev­els, then won a schol­ar­ship to the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies in Ja­maica to do med­i­cine. In 2007, Pil­grim was di­ag­nosed with clin­i­cal de­pres­sion and her doc­tors rec­om­mend­ed that she take time off from school. She be­gan to dab­ble in card mak­ing again, but just as a hob­by, to give to friends and fam­i­ly for Christ­mas.

But the for­mer med stu­dent didn't re­alise how much a card could re­al­ly ex­press pos­i­tive emo­tion un­til af­ter she tried to slit her wrists in a se­ri­ous sui­cide at­tempt. While Pil­grim lay re­cov­er­ing, the hos­pi­tal cook, Mrs Hack­ett, came up to her room to per­son­al­ly de­mand why she wasn't eat­ing any of the food sent to her room.

"And she asked me what I want­ed to eat," Pil­grim said. "Then she start­ed mak­ing all my favourite things, every day, fruit sal­ads in­clud­ed. Af­ter I left, I came back the fol­low­ing week with a card for her. She treat­ed me like I was re­lat­ed to her; it was a re­al­ly lov­ing ges­ture. I re­mem­ber re­al­ly feel­ing grate­ful to her and want­i­ng to show her that. So I chose to do it with some­thing I re­al­ly know how to do well: with a card."

That start­ed her love af­fair with cards in earnest. Pil­grim didn't go back to med school; she'd left a com­pet­i­tive high school to go in­to a very com­pet­i­tive pro­gramme and even­tu­al­ly re­alised that it wasn't what she want­ed to be do­ing right then. And since she'd nev­er paid very much at­ten­tion to her artis­tic side be­fore, "When I was al­most forced to have the down­time, I said, 'Ok let me see where I can go with this.'" She be­gan col­lect­ing card­stock, sta­tionery, trolling the In­ter­net for ideas, prac­tis­ing with sketch pads. A self-de­scribed sta­tionery ad­dict, Pil­grim im­ports most of her ma­te­ri­als from art stores in the US and oth­er coun­tries. Her cards use tex­tured card­stock, em­bossed with sub­tle, ex­ot­ic pat­terns.

She em­bell­ish­es with lighter pa­per, like a spe­cial pa­per made in Thai­land with bits of bark and leaves pressed in. "My friends are al­ways laugh­ing be­cause they've nev­er seen any­body with so many types of pa­per. I put down dif­fer­ent pieces of pa­per that I like to­geth­er be­cause I have to get some­thing to spark my in­ter­est. When I see some­thing I like, and think it would work well in a card, I do sketch­es. When I'm fin­ished, I take a pic­ture, put it up on the Face­book page and see if some­one likes it." Al­most from the very be­gin­ning, peo­ple have been or­der­ing Pil­grim's beau­ti­ful cards with the per­son­al touch. From birth­day cards, to con­do­lences, to wed­ding in­vi­ta­tions, Es­pe­cial­ly for You by Ay­o­dele has done them all.

"My first of­fi­cial job was do­ing some of­fice warm­ing in­vi­ta­tions, about 70 cards. And she want­ed them in a week. I said yes which was crazy since I had to stay up every night, do­ing the let­ter­ing by hand. But the feed­back was re­al­ly good." Pil­grim is still deal­ing with her de­pres­sion, but she's man­ag­ing it well. She takes a dai­ly spin class, man­ages her stress lev­el, feeds her­self right and sees a ther­a­pist. But she wants to be open about what hap­pened to her, since de­pres­sion is of­ten a very hard sub­ject to talk about. "When you're de­pressed, just the ef­fort of get­ting out of bed and in­ter­act­ing with peo­ple is very, very hard. So you do a dis­ap­pear­ing thing. And that's what the sui­cide at­tempt was. But af­ter I left the hos­pi­tal, I was see­ing things with dif­fer­ent eyes. I knew that I still had some­thing to live for, but I didn't know what it was yet."

Now, with the free­dom to be cre­ative and ap­pre­cia­tive clients, Pil­grim's joy is def­i­nite­ly back. "It's re­al­ly ex­cit­ing where I am in life right now, be­cause I re­al­ly don't know what the next step is. I've been dab­bling in a lot of dif­fer­ent things, like mar­ry­ing the card thing with gifts with my cousin. She's a chef and she bakes these lit­tle good­ies that we pack­age and sell. That's an­oth­er op­por­tu­ni­ty. But I will def­i­nite­ly stick with the card thing. More than the mon­ey, I re­al­ly, re­al­ly like it when peo­ple en­joy the prod­uct. I want them to feel hap­py." For more in­for­ma­tion, con­tact Es­pe­cial­ly for You by Ay­o­dele on Face­book.