“Measure twice. Work with your pattern. Don’t fight the fabric.”
These are the words of my mother that ring through my ears each time I work with a textile. Having been born* and raised in a custom drapery workroom, I enjoy textiles way too much; the way they feel can send me into a state of euphoria or grate on my nerves for hours. The way they drape and hang can set my mind at ease with their proper proportions or make my eyes dizzy with their lack thereof.
I was surrounded by luscious silks, elegant cottons, and dramatic velvets… fabrics we could never afford. The love for textiles continued as I traveled the world in my teens, picking up ikats (before I knew what one was) and batiks as I went, and trying to decorate my dorm room or home with them. I was trained to sew from a very young age and inherited my mother’s heavy metal Elna – my father’s wedding gift to her in 1979 – from which I was proud to produce custom place mats and napkins for my home and crib sheets and accessories for our first baby.
After many years of exclaiming to my entrepreneurial husband “Oh! I just imagined the most interesting pattern! I need to draw it!”, he encouraged me to finally put my money where my mouth was and make something.
Bloom Textile Co. is the marriage of a love for textiles and a desire to own my own business, with my husband working right along with me. We are just starting this venture by offering table linens from curated fabrics, but our goal is to create those textiles our self and venture into other home goods and fashion fabrics.
*Funny story: I truly was born in the bedroom that became my mother’s workroom in our lovely, but tiny for a family of six, brick Cape Cod in East Nashville, TN. I learned to crawl in there and may even have attempted to eat a sewing pin off the otherwise immaculate floor… which resulted in a trip to the ER, a panicked mom, and an unscathed baby.
