Floral Embellished Jute Coin Purse in Sky Blue from Java, "God's Grace in Sky Blue"

"I'm from Jogjakarta, a small city in the Central Java Province and I love it here. There are many people from around the world here to study, learn our language, culture, etc. That's why Jogjakarta is also known as 'student city.'

"I grew up in a big family, where education is very important. I am the youngest of three sisters and seven brothers. My dad was a soldier and my mom was a homemaker.

"I was faced with very difficult times when I divorced my husband, and also my own business went bankrupt about the same time. I'm a divorced woman and single mother of a daughter and two sons. Having children has taught me many things, including how to be more responsible as well as more mature in thinking and attitude. When I was low and feeling depressed, everyone seemed to ignore me and so I had to swallow all the pain and deal with it by myself.

"With great effort and lots of tough experiences, my venture picked up slowly up, it got better until finally it got back to normal. What I learned from this experience is that your success and happiness only depends on yourself. Nobody else.

"I work with a good team and I direct them based on their talent and experience. We use linen, woven fabrics and leather as our main materials. They are easy to find here but just need quality control before we can get to work with these materials.

"I design, do the quality control and some aspects of the products, the rest is done by artisans with my supervision. I try to include elements from our culture, traditional classic motifs in my designs so my products look different. We work with manual tools only, we don't use any huge machinery.

"I found out about Novica through a friend. I hope this association will lead to a market expansion, which would mean more work for us."