When she was made redundant during maternity leave, Laura Lonsdale designed an eye-catching new career.
A happy family Christmas is on the cards for Laura Lonsdale and she should know – she designed the cards.
Her striking Christmas cards will brighten many festive mantlepieces this year with their bright, colourful designs. But she launched her business with a range of cards aimed at a rather more niche market: her first designs said ‘sending positive vibes to your uterus’ and ‘sperm meets egg’.
She and her husband Ste live at Clayton-le-Woods with their daughter Penelope who will turn three in April. For a long and stressful time, the couple struggled to conceive and the cards she created were partly a response to their experiences.
‘No-one knows what to say when you’re going through IVF,’ Laura said. ‘Even close friends can often stay quiet because they don’t want to say the wrong thing, so the idea of the cards was to help break that cycle.
‘When I was having IVF I joined support groups to meet other people like me. None of my friends have been through it and, understandably, they didn’t know what to say. The cards have had a really good reaction and they’re going really well.’
Laura, whose two sisters and father are accomplished wildlife artists, has been with IT manager Ste since 2013 and the couple married in 2019.
‘I turned 30 in 2017 and we had been trying for a baby for about a year,’ she said. ‘I had a scan that showed I didn’t have many follicles and a low AMH, which is a measure of fertility – anything below 10 is low and mine was 3.4. To have IVF on the NHS, the count needed to be above five because it’s an expensive procedure and the chances are lower if your count is below that.’
The couple investigated private IVF clinics and with a gift of money from Ste’s family, started the treatment. Laura went through three rounds of IVF involving injections of drugs that encourage the body to produce a greater number of eggs which are then removed and put together with the sperm. It’s then a matter of seeing how many fertilise and how many survive.
'After the third round we found out about a clinic in Athens,’ Laura said. ‘In this country, it felt to us like the procedure was all about the money, but there it felt there was less of a focus on that. We had a Skype call with the director and signed up for two rounds for 4000 Euros.
‘In the end, we had three rounds in this country and three in Greece and when it seemed like it had worked, I was very closely monitored and I was very anxious. All pregnancies are stressful, but after what we had been through, I felt ours was especially so. But after my 20 week scan I started to really enjoy it.’
Laura was made redundant during her pregnancy and started designing IVF and fertility cards as a way of keeping busy and giving people a chance to show their support for others in a similar situation. She had designs accepted by online retailer Thortful and started to build her portfolio.
Their daughter was born during the first lockdown on April 9, 2020 and they named her Penelope after the director of the Serum Clinc in Athens.
Many of the cards she was sent to celebrate the birth – and birthdays and Christmases since – were ones she designed. And there may be more cards landing on her doormat in the near future: after a family Christmas, Laura and Ste are planning to return to Athens for another round of IVF in the hope of giving Penelope a sibling.
‘I’ll be going easy on the fizz at Christmas in preparation for that, but we’ll have the family at our house for Christmas and I’ll be cooking for ten,’ said Laura who now has her own online shop and is planning to add to her range and introduce accessories and wrapping paper.
‘The cards I design are the cards I would want to send to someone,’ she added. ‘The early ones I did were very sweary and dirty but I’ve added a lot of different kinds of cards to the range since then. I have more than 600 designs now.
‘There are cards for all occasions and some for occasions you might not think there are cards for! My fertility cards are now available online at Funky Pigeon and they will be launching on the Moonpig site this month as well which is huge because they don’t have a range like it on there.’
* To see more of Laura’s designs, go to lauralonsdaledesigns.com and Lancashire Life readers can claim 20 per cent off cards with the code 'Lancs20'.
