TheSewingFool

I think I sewed my first button on when I was 6. I remember sitting on my parents bed as my mother showed me how. I had a small, plastic, pink, Barbie sewing machine that I got for Christmas at about that age. It came with a Barbie size dress dummy and pattern pieces. The machine never worked so very well, but I did cut many a pattern pieces out and some I taped together and others I did a simple running stitch to keep them together. Of course I also took just random scraps of fabric and tied them around my dolls. My mother being an upholsterer by trade and a seamstress for the love of sewing there were always scraps of fabric to play with.

As I grew up I learned a lot from my mother and by trial and error on how to create clothes. I remember using old curtains as dress up clothes, they were great you could run a drawstring thru the top opening and have skirts or capes or whatever you could imagine. In the 6th grade I took a sewing class. My project was a simple t-shirt nightgown with big patch pockets. By High School I was making myself all kinds of clothes. I loved the nights when I didn't have anything to wear the next day so I just made something. I didn't really use commercial patterns at this point. We did when it came time for the prom dress, but even then we changed the design of the pattern.

So I started college out of High School as many do. At one point school was getting to be too expensive and I really didn't know what I wanted to do so I dropped out and got a job. I started working at a chain fabric store on the sales floor. I worked for that company for 6 years in that time I worked from that sales floor position to supervisor and then into the manager training program and finally I was a manager for one of the Detroit area stores. My favorite time of year was Halloween and helping customers figure out how to make the costumes they were envisioning. I left the fabric store to go back to school now knowing what I wanted to do.

I enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit, MI.. They have an excellent program for Fashion Design and Merchandising. You can follow either the Design or Merchandising path, I chose Design. I graduated in May of 2009 Summa Cum Laude.

Which brings me to now. I opened my store in June 2009 and am looking forward to the opportunities it holds.

Thank you for reading this far. Now you know how I came to love design and sewing.