A Glasgow sewing enthusiast has said her business is booming after helping people to learn a new skill and feel distracted during a tumultuous two years.
Jenny Drew, 34, founder of Sew Confident, says that more people than ever have taken an interest in sewing, and she has supported them through teaching them to help them de-stress and escape their troubles.
Jenny opened her Finnieston studio in 2014 after several years of freelance teaching, which consisted of long hours and late-night drives across the country.
She said: “I was putting nine sewing machines in the back of my wee Corsa and lugging them up and down stairs to my flat and all over Glasgow, Dundee, Edinburgh and Aberdeen.
“Once I drove to Aberdeen, taught an eight-hour class and drove straight back.”
To cope with the wider demand, Jenny developed two more franchises in Dundee and Chorley, and she is moving into a bigger Glasgow studio next month.
She said: “We have never been so busy. We have three classes with spaces and every other class has a waiting list. It’s wild. I don’t think it’s going to slow down.”
Jenny credits the success of Sew Confident to this surge in popularity for sewing, and she thinks this was enabled further by the COVID pandemic.
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She said: “I read somewhere that sewing officially became mainstream during the pandemic.
“People realised they had to start thinking of hobbies. You can watch everything on Netflix in two weeks but then what do you do?
“I know that a lot of people either got into it or picked it up after years of not sewing because they needed something to pass the time.
“Now it’s bigger than ever and it’s still growing. There are so many sewing accounts on Instagram and it’s just everywhere.”
Jenny also feels that the pandemic not only encouraged people to become more interested in sewing but to cherish the hobby during such an uncertain and upsetting time.
She said: “A lot of our customers have become personal friends and we’ve become close, so we realised that if we were struggling, they were too.
“I knew I had to keep the business afloat as we had staff and franchises, but more importantly we had to support the customers. They were supporting us the whole time, coming to classes and being our friends.”
Jenny is reminded of this as she sees the situation in Ukraine and rising costs splashed across the news, and feels that wherever people need comfort and respite, there will be demand for an escape.
She connected with customers through online sessions and has always made sure to avoid conversations about current affairs and create a community where making friends was possible in a national lockdown - a “safe haven” as she calls it.
She added: “We were just trying to give people a bit of respite. We had a lot of NHS workers who joined, who you’d think wouldn’t have a lot of time, but who need to take a step away. When you’re sitting at a sewing machine all you can focus on is that.
“We struggled from a business perspective, but we grew as a little community.”
While Sew Confident’s market consists mainly of women, Jenny’s classes cater to all interests. One very popular class is the Memory Bear class, in which people can bring materials that remind them of loved ones and make a teddy bear from them.
Often, the bears are created in memory of someone who has passed away, but happy memories can be made too.
Jenny said: “Some people bring in baby grows after their children have gotten older, so they can remember when they were babies. It’s a nice class to teach, it’s like therapy for people as they go down memory lane over these things that they’re putting into a little bear.”
Embroidery, knitting and crochet, clothes-making and quilting are just some of the other classes on offer, as well as a special class for Mother’s Day.
Jenny said: “We’ve got classes for all levels as we don’t assume anyone can already sew, but the Mother’s Day class is also about spending quality time. You can send your mum a bunch of flowers but at the end of your day, your mum wants to hang about with you.
“That is everything, time is the most valuable thing you have and can give to anyone.”
Speaking of time: when it comes to the future, Jenny is certain that sewing is not slowing.
She said: “We’ve got the slow fashion movement, where more people are starting to think about sustainability and where their £2 Primark t-shirt is coming from. When you buy the fabric and spend hours making something, you realise it didn’t cost £2 and people are getting underpaid.
“People are also realising that with rising bills and costs they may need some skills to tighten the purse strings. You learn to make your own clothes, and when you spend that time on it, you will never throw it out.
“And you don’t just learn to make new clothes but fix old ones. You can breathe new life into an old pair of jeans.”
But as business continues to excel for Jenny, she still has one main goal: “I just want to keep making sure people are carving out time to completely distract themselves from the world, put their phone away and just get absorbed in something creative.”
For more information on Sew Confident, visit www.sewconfident.co.uk.
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