My Journey

For those of you who know what you want early in life and pursue it, I applaud you. For those who take the longer journey, going down different paths, welcome to my world. My journey took me on a 15 year military career, to owning and operating a vending business and a cleaning business to working multiple network marketing businesses in between. All the while sewing only for my family and me. I’m tired just thinking about it!

I ultimately started my sewing business providing alterations services as well as making custom clothing for individual clients using store bought patterns. The one thing I can say about doing alterations is that I hated doing alterations, but I was very good at it. Being very meticulous, my goal was to complete the work I did without anyone being able to tell that any work was done. A client once told me they

inspected their garments to try and figure out how I altered them because except for how the clothes fit, they didn’t look any different than when they gave them to me. Goal achieved! Having someone tell me they tried to figure out how I did it. Okay, there were a few aspects of alterations that I enjoyed and that is the look on people’s faces when they tried on the garments I altered or repaired for them. I altered a bridesmaid’s gown for a lady who expressed how much she hated the gown and how awful she looked in it. When I brought the garment back to her and she tried it on, she not only loved the dress but how she looked in it, because now it fit her perfectly. Another client had a gown that had intricate beadwork where most of it had fallen off. She asked if I could replace the beading and I said yes. She told me when I delivered the gown with the beading recreated to its original pattern, that she had taken it to someone who told her to remove the remaining beadwork as it couldn’t be repaired. Even after 12 years of doing something I didn’t really like to do, the joy on people’s faces made it all worth it.

I’m thankful for sticking to it because being self-taught, doing alterations taught me a lot about clothes construction. It also prepared me for creating my own designs because when doing alterations, you work without written instructions, or at least I did. When I designed a garment, I wrote instructions after the fact so if I ever wanted to recreate an item, I wouldn’t have to do much thinking.

It's been a long journey and there were many times I questioned whether what I was doing would amount to anything. The poem ‘Don’t Quit’ that I hung on my wall was my constant reminder to keep going. But the Word reminded me that everything is in God’s timing.

Proverbs 16:9 ‘A man’s heart plans his way, But the LORD directs his steps’.