Books to Help You Get to Know Your Sewing Machine - VS Enterprises

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When I was a kid, sewing was one of those things they taught us in school – but only the needle and thread version. When I was in my late teens at university, I started watching Project Runway and decided I wanted in on the action. I got a cut price sewing machine, set it up on a table, and taught myself the basics – enough that I was able to make my own Halloween costumes, but not tailor a fancy jacket.
The books I’ve listed will help to get a total beginner or a lapsed learner back to the needle and thread and back to the sewing machine. Ever since I was a child I’ve only ever seen pictures of white sewing machinists and tailors – a problem that persists through the sale of sewing merchandise and advertising. The Huntswoman blog ran a great piece on this at the end of 2018, calling on Bernina, Singer, Brother and Janome among others, to increase the visibility of people of colour in their social media imaging. This problem also persists in book publishing on the topic, which is full of incredibly talented people, but very few representations of people of colour.
To that end, on top of the below books, it’s worth mentioning that there are a series of great bloggers of colour who dedicate their online time to sewing and pattern making for real women, featuring themselves in some incredibly photographs that are a total joy to browse through – try Mimi G for amazing patterns and That Black Chic for street style adaptations of patterns I remember as being incredibly boring in school.
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Love at First Stitch by Tilly Walnes

One of my absolute favourite traditional books is Love at First Stitch by Tilly Walnes, which comes with a number of paper patterns a sewer can cut out and use themselves. The book goes through equipment, teaches basic skills and leads a beginners through a few projects from easiest to more complex, letting the maker pick their own fabrics and sense of adventure. The patterns are fresh with a vintage tinge and super flattering.

Sew Fab by Lesley Ware

Lesley Ware wrote Sew Fab for the younger sewer, up to early teenagers. However, if you’re a total beginner and value quirky diverse illustrations and happen to have a younger person you could make some projects for, So Fab is a great resource. For younger sewers, it will help them establish a sense of style and self confidence, with positive images and plucky projects.

The Sewing Book by Allison Smith MBE

Any sewer would love a copy of The Sewing Book by Allison Smith MBE. It’s a cornucopia of skills teaching, equipment listings and pattern options. It’s a great book for learning and almost acts as a dictionary of sewing. I never fail to learn something new when I pick it up.

Sewing Happiness by Sanae Ishida

Sewing Happiness by Sanae Ishida goes against the modern adoration of instagram perfection in our lives and homes. Ishida writes with genuine warmth about making things for happiness alone after her own difficult illness. Vowing to sew all of her own and her daughter’s clothes for a year, Ishida’s patterns are tied together by season and range between clothing and homewares. The book brought me a great sense of joy and pulled my focus to the things that really matter – home, love, family. Worth a look for anyone who wants something with a lot of inspiration.

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Sewing a place in history, one stitch at a time - VS

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Jessica Young can laugh now, but it was not funny when a client once asked if an article of clothing she had ordered for a re-enactor costume was indeed hand sewn.
The stitches, the client believed, were too perfect.
“I said, ‘thank you,’” recalls Young, 34, of Trafford.
Young is a re-enactor and owns Penny River, selling historical accessories, kits and sewing supplies, primarily from the 18th-century era.
The name is inspired by her oldest daughter, River Penelope, 6.
Young is offering a series of historical sewing courses at Bushy Run Battlefield Museum in Penn Township.
Classes focus on the basics of hand sewing from a historical perspective and are appropriate for all sewing levels — from “never-held-a-needle” beginners to proficient craftspeople, according to a course description.
“This is the perfect place to get help fitting your corset, setting a sleeve or making sure that hem is even,” Young said.
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Young has presented at Bushy Run before, showing pieces of typical 18th-century dress for men, women and children as part of the site’s History Speaks Series.
“I came in one day (to Bushy Run) — they sell my things in the gift shop — and said, ‘What if we have a class?’” she said.
“Michael Tusay (museum facilitator) said, ‘Let’s go for it. ’ I created a curriculum, and he did the advertising. At the first one we had 12 come to learn the basics. The first hour is instruction, the second is (work on) your own project,” she said.
Keeping history in the forefront
“We have been trying to think of more ways to keep something going during the off-season,” Tusay said, noting Bushy Run closes each year at the end of October.
“She reached out about wanting to start the sewing workshop series and some more conference-style programs later, and that overlapped perfectly,” he said.
Museum officials also condone the learning opportunity Young is offering.
“We like the concept of people doing hands-on, physical things and getting to learn. Her (sampler) workbook is amazing,” Tusay said.
Sharing her skills
“I started sewing essentially to enhance playing dress up when I was a little kid,” Young said.
A graduate of the University of Richmond with a degree in theatrical costuming, she worked at Colonial Williamsburg as a seamstress during college.
The Murrysville native stayed in Virginia and taught theater for a year before she and her husband, Tom, moved back home in 2008 “with great plans and dreams.”
“Then the economy crashed,” she said.
Young worked as a costumer for Carnegie Mellon University’s drama department.
She also taught creative arts and sewing at Propel charter schools for a few years until the program was cut.
“I had some awesome, dedicated students at the high school level. They were making their own clothes,” she said.
Forging a new path
Upon learning she was expecting her first child, Young decided to stay home for a while.
“I made my sister’s wedding dress right after my daughter was born,” she said.
“I did it again for a friend — after swearing I would never do it again — after my second daughter (Rowan, 3) was born,” Young said, laughing.
She launched her business in 2017 and sells her work on Etsy.com
“When I worked in Williamsburg, I made accessories — caps, aprons, undergarments. I started an Etsy shop with the goal of setting up a booth at a local history fair,” Young said.
“There is a really large, historical costuming community I find through social media. … That’s how I do most of my marketing,” she said.
She has clients all over the world and does constant research to keep her work as authentic as possible.
Young, who works out of her home, lists over 100 products on her Etsy site, from stockings and gloves to embroidered pincushions, Colonial caps and kerchiefs and several DIY embroidered pocket and bonnet kits.
Hand sewers can start immediately on the embroidery kits, including for fingerless mitts, which covered women’s arms from elbow to fingers and offered both warmth and sun protection.
“Everyone from the queen to washerwomen wore them,” Young said.
Making it by hand
“Historical clothes are couture, meaning they are made for a specific body,” Young said.
“Historically, you had help when you dressed. My husband has been my lady maid,” she said, laughing.
“I got frustrated with not being able to fit myself. I put out a call online to establish a place and time for people who want to learn hand sewing. I got a good response,” Young said.
Participants have included re-enactors, hobbyists and one young girl who is making puppet costumes.
Two more classes are planned, on Nov. 14 and Dec. 12, and walk-ins are welcome.
Young and several friends are planning one-day winter classes at Bushy Run to include hand embroidery, shift-making and creating historical patterns from academic texts.

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Softwear Automation launches Sewbots-as-a-Service - VS

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Softwear Automation, an Atlanta, GA, based machine vision and robotics start-up, has announced Sewbots-as-a-Service, a rental lease service to allow manufacturers, brands, and retailers to source and manufacture in the US at a lower cost than outsourcing and with greater predictability and quality.
“From 1994 to 2005, the United States lost more than 900,000 textile and apparel jobs to offshoring,” the company explains. “Fast-forward to 2018. The pendulum is swinging back, and textiles are returning as lean, highly automated, environmentally conscious production facilities.”
“Within the last six years, there have been significant announcements by foreign-owned textile companies investing in the United States, with site selection choices clustered in the Southeast including the first Chinese owned Cut Make Trim factory in Arkansas.”
“Despite this industry reversal, the seamstresses are not returning. While the knowledge can be shared to upskill workers, people don’t have the desire to work in a traditional textiles factory.”
To solve this and accelerate the growth of US based textile manufacturing, Softwear Automation is introducing Sewbots-as-a-Service, which creates immediate ROI benefits while enabling scale across retailer, brand, and manufacturer.
“While we understand the benefits of Made in America, the focus of this programme is to offer US textiles manufacturing more control, greater margin, faster turn times and less inventory,” the company explains.
The new product is focused on bringing scale to basic sewn good production within the country of destination (a local supply chain). This focus allows manufacturers to move current seamstresses to premium products while creating a more reactive, reliable and sustainable textile ecosystem, the company says.
Sewbot is a fully automated sewing workline built to scale sewn goods manufacturing. The next generation Lowry Sewbot is built to produce numerous types of sewn products in different industries and supports both local and global supply chains. It has been commercially deployed in the automated production of rugs, bath mats, automotive products, medical products, pillows, towels and more.

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Machines could fuel comeback of textile industry in South - VS

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ATLANTA — Machines are transforming the way textiles are produced — and they could fuel a comeback for the Southern textile industry.
Automation and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing the workplace in the United States, as machines perform tasks once done by humans, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported .
Now, automated sewing could breathe new life into the South’s garment industry, which has been decimated in recent decades as jobs went to cheaper workers overseas.
But it will look a lot different than before.
The idea behind one textile manufacturing plant of the future was dreamed up in a one-story industrial building on Atlanta’s west side. Twenty-four “Sewbots” will soon be churning out a shirt about every 30 seconds in a new factory in Arkansas.
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The fully automated assembly line in Little Rock, Ark., is a closely watched advance in the U.S. textile industry, as machines produce more clothing.
Suzhou Tian Yuan Garments Co., the Chinese owner of the new Arkansas plant, has cheap reliable power, proximity to cotton and well-off consumers. And it opens the way for American-made robots to compete with low-cost foreign labor, the Atlanta newspaper reported.
The Arkansas plant is expected to open later this year and employ 400 workers. Many of the positions are for technicians with coding and electro-mechanical knowledge.
“We want people who can work with robots,” said Palaniswamy “Raj” Rajan, chief executive of Atlanta-based SoftWear Automation, which designed the Sewbots.
“That is where the new economy comes in,” Rajan said.
The idea behind the Sewbots sprung from federally funded research at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The government was interested because military equipment, including uniforms, must be U.S.-made, the newspaper reported.

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Robots that sew t-shirts in seconds - VS

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If they are implemented in fashion industry, sewbots would be the first great technological transformation in clothing since the sewing machine.

Robots already make T-shirts. Robotics has long since been present in car assembly lines: it is common to see in its factories huge articulated arms restlessly and tirelessly assembling doors and motors, tightening screws and measuring mirrors. It is forecasted that these scenes will also become common in clothing factories.

Until now, low labor costs in Asian countries have delayed technological innovation in textile production chains. However, as technology becomes cheaper and labor costs increase, the integration of robotics in clothing factories is only a matter of time. It is estimated that the personnel cost for each T-shirt is 33 dollar cents, while in case of a machine, that price falls to 5 cents.

One of the companies that has evolved the most in this regard is the US Softwear Automation, creator of the Sewbot robotic system, which cuts the fabric and assembles it within the same space. The machine uses cameras and robotic arms that take only four minutes from cutting and sewing the fabric to making the garment. One of the first contracts that it signed was with the US Department of Defense for 1.25 million dollars.
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Softwear Automation is one of themost developed companies in the sector, creator of the robotized system Sewbot

It was followed by the Chinese clothes-making giant Tianyuan Garments, whose main customer is Adidas. Through this operation, which was carried out in 2017, the company installed an assembling line with the capacity to manufacture a T-shirt every 22 seconds, which would allow it to produce up to 800,000 a day.

Li&Fung, the world’s largest supplier of clothes by revenue, also announced last year a partnership with the technological company based in Atlanta. The Chinese group argued that the digitalization of a part of the production process translates into the opportunity of increasing the efficiency of manufacturers and suppliers, but also into the creation of new more skilled jobs.

The so-called neo-relocalization of the industry is highly linked to the technology development in clothing factories, which still are the most labor-intensive in terms of manpower. As technology reduces its costs, these new robotized factories will forge their way once again into the Western World. The new facilities that are being built in Ethiopia, one of the future sourcing hubs, already include sewbots, with the purpose of not depending on the rising trend in labor costs. 

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