There was a moment five years ago, when a spark of remembrance awakened and stirred something deep within me. As if this part of myself had been sleeping or lying dormant for a very long time. In that moment it was if I had awakened an ancient remembering that felt like warmth and comfort and true ‘Ancestral Mothering’. The kind that hadn’t forgotten the sacred everyday way of living, doing, creating and leading. I knew without “knowing” the ordinary yet profound magic and depth that I was feeling and in the presence of.

This moment unfolded for me upon a visit to the Northwoods where I met a woman who lived off-grid and made her own soaps and body care products…and…sewed. In fact every time we would get together for tea, there she would be in her handmade dress sewing or knitting or embroidering.

Being in the presence of how she lived her life inspired in me LIFE again! And I would go to the Northwoods and then come back to the city and ground and integrate what I had received and then go back to the Northwoods again and on and on for years until last year when I decided to take a leap of faith and move there myself. That is a story for another time, but towards the end of that journey (I lived there for a year), two things happened for me…I went to visit my parents and sewed a dress with my Mom and I attended my friend’s sewing retreat and made my own dress by hand.

Ever since those two moments, I have been sewing and sewing and sewing!

~

When I was growing up, my Mom was a seamstress. She actually went to school to become a fashion designer and was very talented and still is, but shared her gifts of sewing through teaching Home Economics and sewing everything, you name it, for the people in the little town I grew up in. She sewed her own winter coat, her wedding dress, clothing for herself, towels and goods for our home and sewed all of my prom dresses, graduation dress and wedding dress. I wanted nothing to do with sewing when I was growing up, although I loved to design clothing…I would hand sketch clothing designs on little pieces of paper, hand them to my Mom and ask her to make them for me and she would! I had forgotten all of this until that moment in the Northwoods that touched me so deeply.

~

So, it turns out, that my Mom planted a seed within me when I was little, and my friend in the Northwoods awakened that seed and now I am sewing…guided and inspired by my Mom and her gifts and my friend and her medicine. All of my sewing creations are intuitive; I don’t use patterns. I just feel the dress or the shirt and let it guide me and speak to me until eventually I am in the presence of an actual handmade dress or shirt or jacket.

~

We can create it out of an old quilt or blanket that is really special to you or order new natural fabrics like linen or cotton, hemp or wool…