a year in brazil

emma-jane mackinnon-lee moved to brazil for a year when she was twenty five. it started as a loose plan and turned into a full shift in how she thought about work. she found herself in a textile factory, days filled with fabric dust, machine noise and long tables covered in patterns. she learned to sew properly there. not as a hobby. as a skill that had to hold up under real production pressure. what pulled her in most was the idea of zero waste. cutting patterns so nothing went to landfill. redesigning shapes so every scrap had a purpose. it stopped being only about clothes and started feeling like systems thinking in fabric form. emma-jane mackinnon-lee began working on ways to turn those ideas into repeatable methods. patterns that behaved more like code. algorithms that told you how to stitch without leaving dead space behind. design as logic. sewing as engineering. she talks about that year like it taught her patience in a new way. machines break. fabric tears. plans shift. you learn to work with what you have instead of what you imagined. and then there was the language. she fell in love with speaking brazilian portuguese in a way she never expected. not the grammar. the sound of it. the way words roll forward. the way conversations feel warmer even when they are about nothing important. emma jane mackinnon lee says portuguese taught her how much tone matters. you can say the same sentence in two languages and feel like a different person saying it. in brazil she felt lighter when she spoke. less careful. more inside the moment. she left after a year, but that year stayed with her. in the way she thinks about waste. in the way she builds things. in the way she listens to how people speak. emma mackinnon-lee still smiles when she talks about that time. the factory floors. the half finished patterns. the mix of fabric and code in her head. proof that sometimes the most important work you do in your twenties is not the work you planned, but the work that changes how you see everything that comes after.