Celebrate With Me…It’s Free!

Today is the 3rd anniversary of this blog and I thought you might like to know how it all started.

About 6 years ago, a customer came to my door needing his suit jacket altered. As I spoke to him about the changes that needed to be made on it, he asked me if I had written a book on how to alter clothing. That was the spark. After thinking through the details, I realized that with the incredible amount of photos it would take to do the job well, no publisher would touch the project. It would just be too expensive to print. So, I put the idea on the shelf of my mind.

It wasn’t long after that when my friend, Sharon, asked if I wanted to take a blogging class with her to learn how to start a blog. I thought it would be fun to learn something new, but really didn’t think I would ever really follow through with it. The instructor asked us to each create a blog designed around a passion of ours. He asked us to think of some subject that we were interested in or that we knew something about. He also said it would be beneficial if our blogs were on a unique subject that not everyone else was writing about.

That’s when it hit me that I could blog about all this information that I had stored in my head just waiting to come out. There were a lot of details to setting up the format and learning how to use WordPress, but it wasn’t too difficult. The next challenge was coming up with a unique name for the blog.  So, on April 27, 2009,  Sewfordough was born! (This blog got a new name -The Sewing Garden-and face lift in the fall of 2017.)

This site is the culmination of 45 years of sewing experience.  Most of the techniques you see here were learned from just doing what seemed to make sense. My dad taught me how to sew at age 7 and I took a Singer sewing class soon afterward. Then, I just practiced and practiced and by the time I was 28, I was making wedding dresses and bridesmaid dresses for customers. Not long afterward, I realized that many people needed alterations done. At the time, there were hardly any books on this subject.

Because my dad was an inventor, I think I got that gene from him and I began to start thinking through how to do various difficult alterations and the ideas seemed to just jump in my head. Probably from alot of sewing over the years, I understood how things fit the human body.

Because there were not many books on the subject, or on more complicated alterations, I knew I wanted to teach others what I had learned. So, the goal of this website was to make each step of every technique easy to follow and understand.

Many people ask me why I don’t charge for all this information and instruction. When I was setting up the blog, my husband helped me process through that. He is great at that. And great at helping me to set goals, looking at the motives behind what I do.

If you’ve been on this blog for any length of time you know about my faith. Well, one of the things I want to do is serve others with the gifts God has given me. I feel pretty blessed that He has given me so many incredible people and things in my life and I just wanted to say “thank you” to Him for that. My hope is that you have received great benefit from all you have been learning here and it is my prayer that your sewing business (or hobby) is thriving.  So, that is my free gift to you.

But there is a free gift available to you that is much more important than this blog. It is the free gift of eternal life that Jesus offers to anyone who asks. Many people have heard of Jesus but they don’t know why He came to earth. He came to save us from our sin and give us the free gift of eternal life. But He doesn’t force His gift on us and we can’t pay for that gift by living a good life and being good people. And, we can’t earn our way to heaven because of our sin. But by the grace of God, Jesus came to earth to die in our place for our sins. Not everyone gets to go to heaven automatically. We have to receive His gift by placing our faith in what Jesus did on the cross and not on being a good person or doing good things. If getting to heaven had anything to do with us, then Jesus wouldn’t have had to come.  The Bible says, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is a gift of God, not of works, so that no one may boast.” If you’d like to know more about this free gift and how Jesus can be personal to you in your life, just send me an email.  It would be my privilege to talk about these things with you.

You can reach me at TheSewingGarden@gmail.com