Why I'm a Dinosaur and How a Failure Can Really Be a Success

I call myself a dinosaur. Some clients refer to me as "a dying breed". I'm in a small group (or herd, because I'm sounding like some wild animal here) of people who learned sewing skills in the home and smaller still, who continued on to use sewing skills for their career.

It's been a winding, twisting, yet natural evolution for me to land in the sewing room professionally. I have early memories of my mother making scrap quilts at the treadle machine. I was at her feet, not yet old enough to use the machine. She would hand down squares and strips of fabric for me to play with and I would fashion clothing for my small dolls by cutting holes for arms or a neckline in the squares and using the strips of fabric for belts. Later on, mom would teach me how to sew by hand and then on the treadle machine. I continued making fashion for my dolls and this eventually progressed into making articles of clothing for myself as a teenager. I taught myself how to read sewing patterns and was lucky enough to grow up in a home where I could learn by trial and error and by my mother's example, how to give it the future Tim Gunn attitude of "make it work". Sometime before I entered high school, mom acquired a secondhand electric sewing machine and we learned the joy of the backstitch, among other features of a modern machine.

Mom also taught me how to crochet, and encouraged a myriad of artistic endeavors. I tried my hand at knitting, cross stitch, painting, drawing, paper crafts, etc., but sewing remained a favorite past time over the years and into married life and motherhood. (I especially loved sewing clothing for my daughters, of course.)

In my 20's, my employment was mainly in food service, with a sprinkling of a few other jobs. At the age of 29, with a new baby girl, I became a stay-at-home mom. Six years later, our second daughter arrived.

[A side note: It occurs to me now that I usually feel the need to explain why I was a stay-at-home mom. That says something about what kind of emotions I have been working through. In my previous post, I spoke about the environment that I grew up in. I really did take on layers of the people surrounding me. We all do. We all shed them (or don't) at our own pace. I know my mom never believed she was good enough, or smart enough. She was a super star to me. We are breaking the cycle here. I was/am good enough and smart enough. And being a parent is a very important job that I've always taken seriously.]

By now my husband had worked his way up from CJO to Sergeant with the local sheriff's department. He encouraged me to work as a seamstress for the department (sewing on patches, repairing seams, hemming, replacing zippers) and thus began my first paying clients for sewing. Work trickled in via family and friends of the department in the form of prom dress alterations, hems, and zipper replacement. I wanted so badly to be useful in some way other than wife and mother. That part of my life was all consuming and hind sight tells me that I desperately needed a creative outlet and something that was mine alone. I began taking on work that I had never done before. I had no formal tailoring education, but this was pretty fabulous hands on training, with people who were very trusting when my response to "can you do this?" was "I never have, but I'd like to try". The work wasn't overwhelming, but it filled a deep need in me to learn and create.

I loved having the opportunity to be a full time presence in my daughters early years. Still, I also looked forward to the day that my youngest would enter school and afford me the time to find some work outside of the home. I never looked at my sewing work as a career choice back then. I assumed that I would go back to a cooking position at a nursing home or hospital eventually. I think I held this belief that something that I enjoyed, such as sewing, could never be something that made good money. Imagine having a job that you enjoy and get paid for! That's crazy talk! Well, I started talking crazy. Sewing was becoming more of my identity. My projects for people were taking up more space and I needed a place to meet people who needed my sewing skills. I had the thought that I could rent space, much like individual hair stylists do in salons, so I went from salon to salon with my idea. Here again, I was just screaming to be outside of the bubble that was my home life. Over the course of about 5 years, I ended up with consecutively three salons that allowed me to rent space for my sewing business. In those days, I called it Tiny Stitches (my husband's idea--my nickname being Tiny was a play on that). I undersold myself and never charged what the work was worth. I needed experience in pricing and above all, more self esteem to make the business profitable.

And then, the train that I was on derailed. That "bubble" at home, that I was trying to have a life outside of, suddenly popped. In reality, I was trying to escape a miserable partnership. The marriage was never what it should have been and the facade crumbled. Yes, there were happy times, but the dysfunction and pain far outweighed them. [Here I'll just say, some of this has been spoken of in a previous post and I'm just touching on it to show the progress of my sewing business.] Events led me to leaving the home with my daughters and needing money for rent. I got hired at a cafe and lost all of my love for sewing. Soon after, my husband committed suicide and pretty much everything, except caring for my daughters and staying sane, fell by the wayside. Things were so intense at home that I even had to quit the cafe job. I had death benefits to lean on, so I put every ounce of my energy into the three of us going forward and healing. Eventually, I reentered the world of working in kitchens, but I knew this was not what I wanted for my future. I knew that this line of work was taking a toll on my body and the scheduling had me working hours that kept me from feeling like an involved parent. I had an idea that ended up being a failure AND a success.

It was now 2015. I wanted my own business again, but I wanted something else. I had emotionally put up a block in my mind about sewing. I cringed whenever anyone asked "hey, are you still sewing?". I began to think of that skill as "my old life". Here is proof that the words we tell ourselves are so important. They become a holding pattern that mire you in quicksand. I tried to get out by reinventing myself. In deciding on a business and laying out a business plan, I chose to run a gift shop, but I knew I had to allow for a "back-up plan". I decided that if sales were a problem, I could do seamstress work. Well folks, running a successful gift shop is not my forte. And that block I had in my mind about sewing kept me from moving forward. I fought that demon with all of me. I shoved it deep down and stubbornly refused to sew. I kept my chin up about the gift shop and just kept making mistakes. My identity became "woman who struggles", because it was part of that broken record in my head. I can tell you from extreme and painful experience, that if you tell yourself you must struggle, that you most definitely WILL struggle. Somewhere deep in my childhood, my brain had been programmed to believe this was my truth and my path in life.

If this is resonating with anyone, I urge you to perform a metaphorical exorcism on thyself! No one DESERVES to struggle. Working for what you want and struggling for what you want are two different things. It ran so deep with me that when I was giving birth to my first child, I had more than one reason for not wanting any pain medication. In the throes of labor I began to believe that I didn't deserve my baby if I couldn't bear the pain without complaining. I remember feeling so unworthy of motherhood, yet so completely confused by these feelings. (Suffice it to say that labor brings on some crazy revelations about oneself.)

So let's get back to the gift shop. Without listing all of my failures in the retail business, I eventually gave in and started taking sewing again. Even though I was "The Charming Lion Gift Shop", my old clients, who ended up stepping into my gift shop, still remembered me as "Tiny Stitches". I may be stubborn, but that stubbornness also keeps me charging forward, especially when faced with harsh reality. Wedding and prom season alterations literally kept me afloat. And the clients: Well, they've been lovely and gracious and appreciative of my sewing skills and so has the rest of the community I live in. It became too difficult to keep the gift shop open and I began operating solely as a seamstress in 2018. Here's where the "failure" became a "success", most importantly in my own thinking. With the help of loved ones and friends, I started concentrating on what I did right, instead of what I did wrong. Running the gift shop taught me how to market myself. Being a bricks and mortar business taught me how to make sure that people could find me. It taught me what my services were worth. It also taught me how to find my niche and how important it is to connect with your community, even if that's just over the internet (extroverted introvert here!). The skills I learned through creating the gift shop, added to my sewing skills, became my feeling of success. In my mind, it created a career, where once sewing had only been a hobby or a dream job. I love my work, and I look forward to continuing to grow and learn. And for the record, I'm not really a dinosaur. I'm a lion. :D