fashion, stitching, and words

Hello and welcome to words to stitch by!

I’m Jacqueline. To begin with, I love fashion and have been besotted with the notion of fashion ever since I could remember. It all began with the first Barbie collection I received at five or six years old, and this collection had a Dior influenced wardrobe! I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but can now really appreciate the Dior factor my Barbie wardrobe had, never knowing how this early, tactile exposure to fashion would draw out and eventually influence my love of fashion. Being born in the early sixties, it’s exciting to recall all the fashions that my relatives wore in that era. I had a beautiful aunt who used to mesmerize me whenever she did her bouffant hairdo! The film and television industry also influenced my fashion penchant, and here I recall rushing home with my brothers after school in order to watch the latest episode of Get Smart so that I could see how Agent 99 would look. Episodes of That Girl, starring Marlo Thomas, is another influencial program that comes to mind, but I think at this point you get my meaning…

I was surrounded by women in my early years who made most of their own wardrobes, and I aspired to do the same thing myself. As a teenager I had dreams of becoming a tailor, but as such a profession was not accessible to me, I settled for a career in the hairstyling industry. This was good, as it kept me in the fashion world, and it was with a keen fashion sense that I excelled for twenty years at that profession, where my attention to detail drove me to the success I had achieved.

After retiring from the hair fashion business, a love of literature, research and my penchant for fine details found its way into the visual arts, where I began to study book binding, calligraphy, and printmaking, and within this realm I discovered such incredible mediums to work with. I spent fifteen years working at studying and creating works in this area, to which some of these works can be seen at theletterarian.com.

And now, I feel that I’ve come full circle and reconnected with my first love: fashion. While I work on my garment projects, I plan to share my research, my experiences, and the techniques I will be using in creating these garments.

So…a bit of fashion…a bit of stitching…a lot of words…

Enjoy!