Judy’s Story

As a young girl growing up in a small town, my neighborhood friends and I, during our summer vacation learned to make potholders on a loom, knit and hand embroider along with the other household chores to occupy our free time. This was my very first taste of handicrafts. Each summer as we got older we did projects, like knit a sweater or embroider aprons.

I first embarked on my sewing journey as an adult when my mother won a sewing machine in a contest and asked me if I wanted it. Being a young mother with two small children, I felt it was a necessary need to mend clothing.

In those early years of marriage with a young family there was not much money for extras. My daughter wanted some baby clothes that fit her Baby Tender Love doll. I decided to take some of her baby clothes that I had kept and cut them down to fit the doll while maintaining the original look of the garment, sort of a mini of the original. I also learned to crochet so I could make her baby doll some sweater sets.

I had a neighbor who had been sewing for many years and I showed her the doll clothes and told her what I had done. She could not believe that I was able to cut the clothing down and maintain the original look of the garments without ever using a sewing machine or sewing before. She told me if I could do that I could do anything. She encouraged me to purchase a pattern and some fabric and make my daughter an outfit.

That was the beginning. I even attempted to put a zipper in the outfit. From that point I made all her clothes, my son his clothes including trousers, jackets and PJ’s and my husband’s sport jackets. Once I made my son a pair of flannel pj’s and put in real French seams. Needless to say the seams outlasted the PJ’s. One year for Easter I made all out outfits including blouses and shirts.

As the kids grew and I reentered the working scene, the sewing became defunct. I pursued my dream of a college education which I obtained (many thanks to my employer at the time) and proceeded with my working career. Much too busy to engage in sewing projects, I turned to making crafts. My mother always wanted to open a shop but it is hard to pay rent on space and we had seen consignment shops come and go. By word of mouth we were able to sell some of our products and made enough money to buy more supplies to keep going.

My mother had done a few Christmas bazaars and thought we should try that route. We attended a few shows and stumbled onto craft fairs. I had recently purchased a new sewing machine that also did embroidery. I planned to embellish our own gifts and clothing, but found that the designs available were beautiful and we could never use all of them on clothing or gifts for ourselves. Checking out the fairs, I found that hardly any crafters were offering machine-embroidered goods of the quality that I had achieved. This is more of an art than a craft and not inexpensive to pursue. I say art because you are able to create your own designs but adding, deleting or resizing the original designs and be able to adapt them to different fabrics.

As we went to the fairs, we saw that vendors had business cards with their name and contact information. We had to come up with a name for our business. We came up with A La Cave Stitchers, because we basically work out of a basement.

We are a good complement to each other. She loves fancy and I like conservative. Mom has a knack for design and construction and although our tastes differ we are always able to come up with workable idea and at times that idea can show up as a one time unique product.

I love being able to stitch up a design and create a product that will make someone feel good and happy whether it is purchased for themselves or as a gift for someone else.

Being a perfectionist, only quality products’ including the thread is used on our line. We have and will consider doing custom work either a one-time request or a large repetitive project. Projects included are company logos and a napkin project for an army ball.