Welcome to the studio!

An invitation for making

Hello, hello! Welcome to my first studio newsletter. I’m Stacey, aka The Crooked Hem, and I’m a scientist, sewist, and educator. I recently started renting a studio space for sewing and making art, and I want to share it with you.

This newsletter is me experimenting with something new. I already have a sewing blog where I write technical reviews of sewing patterns, and an Instagram account where I share photos, but neither feels like the right home for what I want to explore here.

I recently started reading newsletters from artists and makers that I admire, and suddenly it dawned on me: Ah-ha! Newsletters. I love newsletters because they encourage reflection and focus in a way that other social media can’t. They offer a slower-paced, more intimate space for sharing that feels more personal. Newsletters connect me to others through the genuine, lived experiences of creating; I want more of that.

This newsletter will be my space for:

• Sharing the rhythms of my studio and snippets of life in the Pacific Northwest.

• Experimenting with my creative process: sewing, weaving, dyeing, painting, and other crafty pursuits.

• Cultivating the weird and wonderful, celebrating the small joys of making and creativity.

And I’ll tell you a secret: For the first time in my life, I don’t have a plan. Not for this newsletter, not for the studio, not for my creative work in general. I’m letting it unfold however it needs to and learning how to trust myself in the process. And that feels a little scary! But I hope that by writing about the journey, I can bring the destination into a clearer focus.

To quote Joan Didion:

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

As I’m writing this, it occurs to me that the real reason I’m starting this newsletter is to get to know my creative self in deeper ways. It’s an opportunity to shake my own tree and see what sorts of fruits come loose.

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Studio tour

I’ll start this first newsletter with a little tour of the studio. I share the space with my friend, Candace, who is a prolific quilter and textile artist.

The studio is divided into two adjoining rooms. One room is a lounge area with a velvet sofa, comfy pillows, and big bank of windows. To the right of the sofa we have drawers for shared fabric remnants, vintage textiles, trims, etc. Across from the sofa and just out of frame below is a floor loom that neither one of us knows how to use (yet!).

The lounge. Wall hangings by Candace Stevenson.

The adjacent room is our workspace. In the center, we have a large work table that we got from fellow sewist, Sienna. Beneath the table, we have more storage for textiles and other craft supplies.

Candace also runs Fab Rick's Fabrics, so this room serves as her headquarters. You can see an upcoming fabric drop that she’s prepping in the photo below. (This is both a blessing and a curse for me…. it’s great for my fabric stash, bad for my wallet).

The workroom and Fab Rick’s headquarters

Our sewing machines live next to the cutting table. Below is my workbench with my beloved Juki TL-18QVP, a semi-industrial straight stitch machine that I use for quilting and heavyweight garment sewing. Behind the Juki are some of my tools and notions, I’m still figuring out the best configuration.

Many of our sewing tools came from estate sales. When I use them, I like to imagine their history and all of the projects that came before mine. The majority of these vintage tools came from a local textile artist named Donna Prichard, who had massive collection of fabric, notions, and craft supplies that we acquired last fall.

Donna has become the patron saint of our studio. Even though we’ve never met her, we feel a kinship with her through her crafting collections. Her name also routinely pops up for us all over the city; Candace unexpectedly came across one of her books in a used bookstore last week, and we’ve discovered her name written on tools and fabric scraps at Seattle Recreative. She’s always with us, and perhaps she’ll be the subject of a future newsletter, too.

I’ll share many more snapshots from the studio as I go along.

Thank you for being here and for joining me on this newsletter adventure! I’d love to know who’s reading — please feel free to say hi in the comments and tell me about yourself or share something that brought you joy this week.

Until next time,

-Stacey

P.S. - In case you missed it, I’m teaching a pants fitting workshop this summer at the Slow Fashion Sewing Retreat in Maine. Head to the retreat website for all the details, I’d love to see you there!