In the summer of 2020, I was sewing along and thinking about how the sewists in the world were the ones to meet the needs of the masses by sewing 😷 masks. 

(Which isn't a topic I want to dive into, it just was the catalyst for MANY to sit and sew - either for the first time or again.)

Anyways…

While the hobbyists & crafters were sitting down to swoop in and save the day, the professional sewists I personally know were/are suffering from serious 🔥 burn out 🔥 . 

About 75 years ago, everyone had someone in their family that sewed and fast fashion didn't really exist. Or at least not like it does now. 

Home sewists knew how to take a pattern and manipulate it into a shape that matched their body and body image issues were significantly different than how they exist today. 

Then fast fashion came along and the household chore of sewing for the family morphed into crafting and a hobby. 

It's sort of like how my grandma 🧓 has been baking bread her whole life and can tell you if the dough is ready by how it feels. I can bake bread 🍞, but I don't have the feel for it. 

But…. 

Clothes still aren't shaped like humans. Most of the time we can get away without alterations to store bought clothes because we wear stretchy things like t-shirts 👕 & 👖stretch jeans. 

But that doesn't take care of the fact that clothes still don't come shaped like humans. That's where my sewing story comes in. 

Plus size clothes are notoriously terrible for not being shaped like the humans that wear them and I got tired of NOTHING fitting properly. Since I'm plus sized, I thought I'd take matters in my own hands and 🧷 sew my clothes, and long story short I went to work as a Sewist, to gain the skills I wanted. 

I started my professional sewing journey in 2010 and the bulk of the sewists I worked with were in their 50's. It was great because most of them are lifelong sewists and I picked their brains 🧠 about everything on a daily basis. 

Fast-forward to 2020… our area already has had more demand than workers for a few years, and we're all operating at max capacity. Then, the global pandemic came along and added to the workload by stopping everything to make masks. 😷

So, after that first big closure in March and April of 2020, we made masks while you couldn't get any in stores/online and then went right back to sewing wedding gowns and bridesmaid dresses. 👗 

With mandates and shutdowns and venue rule changes, the wedding season was all over the map that year. In our area, sewists are retiring left and right, and for several of them, the pandemic threw them over that edge. 

Now the wedding experts out there say there's a wedding boom, but for us, the workload has quadrupled (or more) because there's fewer workers! 

That got me thinking about how I could train sewists as if they were coming to work for me. The difficulty is that you aren't making money when you train an employee, so I considered the next best thing.

If I film 🎬 while I sew, I can make lessons out of how we alter various things. I’ll end up with a video vault of instruction, and I won’t have to train people on the job if they have a self guided set of instructions. (I've learned that there's a bit more to it than that, but the vision is still what guides our courses.) But, that assumes people know how to work a machine and sew in a straight line. 

That's where the idea for ~Stitch Beautifully~ was conceptualized. I realized that if I started with the very basics… the things you learn in home economics class (if you're fortunate to have had one), that I could teach anyone to sew for a living. 

If you really look at it, sewing isn’t an overly difficult task and it doesn’t take much to be able to sew for clients. The major things are… 

>>>Know how to operate a sewing machine

>>>Stitch in a consistent line

>>>Build your resources and knowledge library

>>>Practice your sewing skills

But… BUT…

The issues is rarely that you "don't know how to sew” because everybody can learn that.

The issue is that once you want to learn to sew, you don't know the right steps to take when doing a project, and not having confidence in yourself while doing the work. The result of this lack of confidence is an EXTREME lack of workers - causing those who are sewing professionally to be operating at burnout 🔥 level.  

All. The. Time.

A poor mindset can derail even the best of the best and cause you to give up. 

Thinking you can just take clients without a mentor is a recipe for disaster…

It will not make you successful.

If you’re wrestling with what you need to do, you need to know that you cannot expect yourself to be successful if you don't commit to learning your craft. You can’t actually pick yourself up by your bootstraps and there is no reason to try when you can learn from our experience. 

🔗~Stitch Beautifully~ is just the beginning of what we have to offer and covers the basics I mentioned above. 

I can’t, in all good conscience, suggest that people start their own sewing business without some way of supporting them in their journey.  And I’m not just talking about “how-to’s” and “tutorials.”

I’m talking about being able to ask for advice on a sewing project.  Being able to bounce ideas about new projects off of other sewists is SO incredibly valuable (irreplaceable) when you’re getting started.  I’m talking about being able to talk about creating boundaries with customers, and creating processes for handling the workload. Don’t forget the paperwork… we’ll talk about that too. 

I’m also talking about shifting your mindset from a hobbyist to a business owner.  

Being successful in business -- or even in life -- starts in the mind with the self talk you roll around in there when you aren’t actively paying attention to what you’re thinking about. 

More importantly, you’re joining a family.  My family. 

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