My booth - 30 years making patterns!

I've got a booth at the American Sewing Guild Conference! In addition to speaking they offered me the opportunity to show some of my work, so ...

I arrived in San Diego yesterday at around noon and came directly to the exhibit hall ...

and this is what I saw, a big empty space with a big box of costumes Simplicity sent and a pile of smaller boxes that contained display mannikins that all needed to be assembled.

I was so lucky to have a small crew of hard working and creative ladies that helped me do all this.  Some of the costumes were crushed from being stored in an over stuffed closet so one lady had to find an iron. BUT, she couldn't get her hands on an ironing board.  We used a piece of cardboard. But it worked.

In addition to the costumes Simplicity sent, I made up seven posters filled with catalog pages of my work going back to 1985 ... so 30 years of my work. How did THAT happen?

This poster shows my oldest work when I worked for McCall's.  The baby room was the very first sewing pattern I ever made. The Bat, Bear and Devil are from my very first licensed design with my name on it, very exciting! And the bottom set of sort of Medievalish/Renaissance costumes is the pattern that caught Simplicity's eye. It was selling very well and they noticed. I had designed these as costumes for kid's dress up and play. AND, surprise! people were using it to make things to were to Renaissance Fairs because there were very few patterns like that at the time.

How things have changed. And I can't help but wonder what became of that baby in the crib, and the little kids in the toddler costumes and the models in the Medieval costumes.  Hmmm

Well, I have plenty more costume of reader's work to post next week. Stay tuned.