How I became a sewing teacher…

I’m always fascinated by how people end up doing what they love as a career. The route is often much more meandering than it might first appear. My career has definitely had its fair share of twist and turns, so today, I thought I would share with you how I became a sewing teacher and the custodian of this very beautiful sewing studio.

Just over ten years ago I dropped out of a politics degree at university. Going to uni was the worst career decision I made: I still have over £10k in debt from being there for just three months. Leaving university (after struggling with anxiety, depression and PTSD) was the best decision I made: it gave me the time and space I needed to recalibrate. I spent about six months locked in my mum’s attic, sewing. And when I came out, I decided that sewing every day would probably keep me quite happy, so I moved back to London, enrolled on a part-time tailoring course and got a paid apprenticeship with a costumiers.

I learnt a lot on the job at the costume makers. One week I was making top hats, the next it was waistcoats. After about a year they asked me to teach the evening corsetry course that they ran. I was terrified - I could make corsets, but that wasn’t the same thing as teaching others to make them. Still, at the tender age of 22 I taught my first class and at the end of the course everyone had indeed made a corset. In fact, one of those students still comes to my classes ten years on, which I’m mega touched by. As part of that job we also picked up performance work and it was super fun to dress up in the costumes as well as labouring over all the fine details in them.

From my early twenties onwards I knew this sewing thing was going to stay with me for a very long time. That’s when I moved to Bristol and started Made My Wardrobe. I gave myself one year to make my entire wardrobe from scratch and decided I would give away all the clothes I had ever bought from shops by the end of the year. I made over 70 garments in that first year. It was never meant to be a business, it was just meant to be a personal artistic project and a chance for me to reconnect with my body. It was also a chance for me to become self-sufficient from the high street and it provided a structure for me to learn a whole load of new sewing skills along the way.

The year was 2016 and blogs were still cool (I still think they are) so of course I bought the web domain mademywardrobe.com and blogged about what I was making. Little did I know, lots of folks would tune in and want to learn how to make their own clothes too. A year and a half after I started Made My Wardrobe, I taught my first workshop under my own company name. Half of the students were friends, but the other half were total strangers and I thought: that was freakin’ cool. The first thing I taught solo was a lingerie workshop, which is actually one of the hardest things to teach. I then taught more corsetry workshops (sticking with the hard stuff) and topped it off with some zero waste pattern cutting workshops (another very hard skill). If I could give my 23 year-old self some advice for that time, it would be to maybe teach something that was a little simpler to sew!

Despite the technicalities, I fell in love with meeting new students and seeing what they could create on a sewing machine. Curve ball - then I left my studio and started living on my grandparents’ narrowboat, which I sort of had a dream of turning into a floating sewing studio. But it turns out that narrowboats, although magical, are very much short on space. From the outside, moving onto the boat in the middle of nowhere might have made no sense. But my mental health has always been a strong guiding force and sometimes I just need to run away from everyone and recharge solo before I can come back and be in the world again.

After a particularly cold winter on the boat I decided I needed a base on solid ground again and I moved back to London for the third time! I started looking for a studio and found the building that would become Threadworks on Gumtree. I took on this big, beautiful attic space in Clerkenwell on my own aged 26. The rent was way more than I had ever paid anywhere, but I fell in love with the windows and I felt like that space was crying out to be full of sewing machines. I ran a crowdfunder campaign and pre-sold workshop spaces for the next six months. The workshops filled up, which was a really promising sign. I kept that studio on for a good year but in the end the landlord turned out to be a charlatan who kept cutting the heating, wi-fi and electrics. My advice to my 26 year-old self would be that you can’t do it all babe. If you’re working on that scale with those overheads you need some sort of team around you. I moved the entire contents of my studio back into my little rented London flat and built my bed up 2m off the ground so that I could store all the sewing machines underneath it.

Without a studio I didn’t really have much of a business, so I knew I had to find another one soon. I discovered a building in Soho just off Berwick Street (when Berwick street was still the home of fabric shops). The building was empty because of planning permission issues and artists had divided it up into little segments. I chose my 3x4m box, painted it that shade of pink I love and, to my total joy, I had two other seamstresses as neighbours either side of me. It was during this time that I worked on some of my most prestigious costume jobs for big London theatres and continued teaching in the gallery space attached to the studios. It wasn’t as grand or as beautiful as my previous studio but the location was great, the workshops filled up, my overheads were much less and I had a community of artists around me again. I was now teaching folks to make really wearable classic garments such as dungarees, bomber jackets and tracksuits. These items were much more satisfying to teach and, through repetition and listening to my students, I refined my teaching skills and gained more experience doing one-to-one fittings during each class.

I finally had the time to digitalise some of my patterns, which was a total game changer. After being asked so many times if I would share my designs, through the magic of PDF patterns I could teach people all over the world to make my designs!

Then I got one of the best emails I have ever received. I was invited to go on an residency on an old converted ferry boat moored in Sausalito, California. I was there with three other female artists and had a month to make whatever I wanted. The beauty of the boat (embellished by every artist before me), the warmth and understanding of the other artists and the sunshine combined in one rich tapestry to become one of the best months of my life. I spent every day developing my quilt-making and clothes-making practice without interruption or question.

Then came Covid and I got one of the last flights out of LAX before it all locked down. All my workshops were cancelled, my costume work disappeared and my studio was being turned into a luxury hotel. London no longer made sense. It was time to get back to Bristol, back to my family who live here.

I decided to move my teaching online. I released online tutorials that my brothers helped me film with love and care. They were truly baffled by the level of detail, watching me make a bra from scratch. Thanks to the fabric and pattern sales during Covid, I felt ready to hire a brilliant team and to take on another epic studio space as lockdown lifted; I’m now sitting in that very studio as I write. This studio has a big place in my heart - I feel grateful for the light, for the trees I look out onto and for that fact that everything has its place. It just fits. I’m most grateful for the fact that I haven’t had to move studio for three years, because packing all this stuff up was getting a little exhausting.

Aside from the odd wobbly moment, the last three years have felt mentally, financially and creatively much steadier. I know what I’m doing, I know my limits, I know what I’m good at and what I’m not. Sharing the teaching with other brilliant practitioners has allowed us to develop as a company and allowed me to regain some work-life balance. I’m a much better teacher if I’m also making for my own practice and maintaining that has become really important.

I’ve learnt so much in the last decade and I’m really excited to share lots of those skills on our first ever Sewing Teacher Training online course, starting in May 2025. If you’re thinking you would like a more creative career and you would like to share your skills with other folks, this could be your time to make it happen with lots of help and guidance from us. I wouldn’t change the path I've taken, but I do wish there was a course like this when I started out to make it a whole lot easier!