Nominee at the 10th annual LA Music Awards
I’m Stacey, I live in Manchester with my husband Timothy and I love to sew.
GET IN TOUCH
You can follow me on various social media by clicking the links in the right hand sidebar at the top of the page.
If you’d like to email me, please do (hover over “email me” and click) – I’d love to hear from you!
SEW HOW DID I GET HERE?
I should start off by saying I was at one time a burlesque performer (2008 -2013). I began to sew little bits and bobs for costume pieces when I started performing burlesque in 2008. If you want to have big sparkly costumes for a smaller price than Dita Von Teese then making your own or customising pieces is the only way to go. I drafted patterns for bits and bobs but really it was stumbling about in the dark.
What I really wanted to do more than anything was make my own clothes. I very much love vintage but I very much can’t afford to buy the pieces I love with the huge price tags. So why not make my own? I thought. Armed with my Nana’s 50s Singer 328K and vintage pattern purchased I was ready to get on with making my first item.
I ran into trouble almost straight away and learnt 2 things:
Sewing to a complete novice is daunting; looking at a pattern when you’ve never seen one before is incredibly off putting.
Vintage sewing machines are beautiful but they’re not up to the task. My Singer is a beauty of a machine but was temperamental and fidgety at times.
So to remedy at least the first point I went off and booked a two day course to make a shift dress. It was the best decision I ever made. We made a pattern from a block tailored to our shape and then made a simple dress from start to finish. I was pleased to find out that sewing came quite naturally to me. It taught me the basics of machine sewing, how to read a pattern and what the hell interfacing was.
Then thanks to my lovely folks I upgraded my machine to a Brother LX17 (as a birthday present) and I was off to a flying start.
WHAT CAN YOU FIND HERE?
My mission is straight forward: make sewing simple.
I found that being a dyslexic seamstress means it is quite difficult for me to understand instructions and it’s easy for me to become confused and at times frustrated.
I aim to help others in a similar position and show you don’t have to be put off by long paragraphs and lengthy explanations.
I don’t pretend to know everything about sewing but I hope that what I write is interesting, helpful or at least entertaining
In my blog you can find:
Items I have made for myself and others
Struggles I have found the solutions to
Reviews of places I have visited and books I’ve read
I’ve found the online sewing community very welcoming and it really has given me a boost to know that there is a group of likeminded sewing folk out there willing to help me with anything I might need, helping me to become better at sewing and it turn helping those who may be starting out as I was.
A HISTORY OF CRAFTINESS
I have always loved crafts, mainly stitching. One of my first memories is being shown how to cross stitch in infant school, where I made a colourful butterfly to give to my Nana, who I lived with at the time.
My Nana taught me how to embroider and I spent many a summer’s evening in their caravan sewing Victorian ladies and flowers onto tea towels as gifts. It’s something I’ve done throughout my life, I don’t think there’s anything better than picking up a needle and thread and making something beautiful from scratch.