Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Something inside me settles when I walk into the City Sewing Room, on Arsenal. It’s a big, sunny space with tall worktables, industrial sergers, dressmakers’ dummies, and a rainbow wall of fabric, and the first three women I see are women my age. Women who used to seem old when they were hogging the pattern books at Jackman’s and I was a teenager eager to sew skimpy little date dresses. Now all I see is that life’s trials have softened their faces—and sharpened their concentration.
They murmur advice—“If you go around a curve too fast, you might get a spiderweb” “…much more durable. If you think about Grandma’s quilts…” “I saw a brass headboard out for bulk pickup—it’d be great to hang your quilts…”—as their fingers fly. Owner Anne Stirnemann comes to greet me.
“God, to have this workspace,” I say. Early in my marriage, I cut out patterns on the floor of our little South City gingerbread house, my husband’s cat walking across the fragile tissue paper in a show of disdain.
“And what do you sew?” Stirnemann asks with warm interest.
“Oh, I don’t sew anymore. I always ripped more than I sewed.”
“We all rip,” she says with a grin. “Hilda once made a straight skirt and went into the bathroom to try it on. We hear all this laughing, and she comes out and says, ‘I put the zipper in at the bottom.’ We’ve all done stuff.”
“Like shorten the same leg twice,” another woman calls.
“Or put a sleeve on the wrong side,” Stirnemann says, “and then rip it and do the same thing again.”
“I consider work with a seam ripper the Zen of sewing,” announces Hilda of the straight skirt.
Stirnemann makes costumes for Circus Flora, cosplay, dogs at Halloween… “Kids needed fish costumes for Seussical, modified so they could dance in them. I went down the shelf and got every sparkly, pretty thing I could find.”
Many of those sparkles came from her dear friend Maggie, who had cancer. Before she died, Maggie asked Stirnemann, “May I have my kids bring over my sewing stuff?” Sure, Stirnemann said, not expecting a U-Haul truck. Seven sewing machines, bins of fabric, books… Others donate, too; she shows me the supply closet.
“A bag of empty thread spools?”
“Well, you never know.”
In back are several younger women—Olivia Enger, who walked out of her job as a CPA to design a line of upcycled rayon dresses; Blair Dobson, who even designs her own fabric. “You’ve heard of the fashion incubator?” Stirnemann asks. “Well, you have to have been in business for several years already. This is the real incubator.”
Art studio, too: Theresa Hitchcock, of Perennial, is using the free-motion quilting machine because she finds straight lines boring. “There’s no feed dog” to guide the fabric, Stirnemann explains.
There is, however, a future service dog—her black Lab puppy—snoozing in a crate. “He can’t come out, because he eats things.”
Just as I get past my surprise at seeing women in their twenties, Stirnemann says something about “one of the guys.”
My head comes up like a prairie dog’s. “Men come here?”
“Oh yeah, we have several. Gay guys who want to make dresses, and straight guys who want to learn how to mend their clothes, and Eddie—he’s a singer…”
When I was growing up, only girls were expected to sew, and it was an occasion for bonding. I remember consoling my best friend over a thrice-mangled wrap skirt for home ec. I remember excursions with my mom to pick out fabric; the weight and squeak of the pinking shears slicing into pure possibility; the shifts in my tastes as I figured out who I was.
“One guy was in the Miss Gay Illinois competition,” Stirnemann is saying. “For the performance part, he did a scenario from Leave It to Beaver. The scene was black and white like a TV set, and he made a black Mrs. Cleaver dress with pearls.”
Photo by Kevin A. Roberts
Helping men fit hourglass dresses to V-shaped frames inspired Stirnemann’s assistant, Morgan Epperson, to refine the art of specialty pattern-making, which she now does for anyone whose body doesn’t fit the standard sizes or who sees a magazine picture and wants to make the outfit. Stirnemann, meanwhile, has a rack of projects waiting: a shirt she’s altering for a police officer to accommodate his bulletproof vest; an ugly gray chiffon formal she wants to try to make beautiful; Christmas stockings for a young family that replicate one the dad’s mother sewed for him 30 years ago; a prototype for a protective soccer headband, with indentations for the ears. “Do all ears fall in the same place on heads?” she asks the room, and people offer theories.
Everything gets talked about here: marital advice from the older women to the younger; wardrobe advice for the gay guys. “And Eddie was here during the Ferguson unrest,” Stirnemann says, “and we had these really good long conversations about race.”
This really is a community sewing room, I think. These days, we’re all figuring out who we are.
