Sunday, August 30, 2009

Welcome to Sew It Up's New Blog!

      I would like to share with you the story of how I became the owner of a fabric store in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, and consequently Sewitup.com, a website focused on bringing the latest in children’s and ladies’ sewing ideas and patterns to sewers worldwide. With my children both in school, I decided I wanted to find a way to share my passion for sewing and needle arts during my new found free-time. With limited high quality fabrics and notions in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, I decided to open a small fashion fabrics store in Colleyville, Texas in 1998. Over the years the store has grown and moved locations to its present location in Hurst, Texas, and in these transitions my mission to provide sewing and embroidery products to local sewers has expanded and taken a more creative direction.    
    When new fabrics came in the store, I was often tempted to design display garments to inspire customers with ideas and new uses for a fabric that they had perhaps not considered. It didn’t take long before I realized that many customers would walk in the door and instantaneously declare, “I want that!,” and we would scurry around the store to gather all of the materials needed to produce an identical twin to the garment on display. It finally occurred to me that a simple solution to this problem would be to collect all of these materials in advance in a kit form, ready for customers when they walked in the door. My sewing kits soon became very successful with my customers, and when our store would travel to various local sewing and quilting shows, many people began to look for our booth in hopes of acquiring one of my latest ideas. I was very flattered when many of these out-of-town customers began to beg me to put my sewing kits online, encouraging me that a website would be very successful and beneficial to the out-of-town clientele base I had developed over the years. It took a few years for us to get Sewitup.com off the ground, but it didn’t take long for it to become a natural extension of my fabric store.
    Sewitup.com became an asset not only to the sewers familiar with our store in north Texas, but also generated a clientele base of its own. Not long after launching our website, we began to travel to other sewing shows across the country to promote our line of sewing kits and fabrics available online. We now have a customer base that spans across the United States--across the world, really! This is in part due to the feature of Sewitup.com in several magazines recently. The website has been exposed in Sew Beautiful, Sew News, Butterick and McCall’s Sewing Today, Quick Quilts, as well as the non-sewing specific publication Southern Living. I grateful for the interest the website has generated by such sources, and am happy to be able to reach out to and inspire the many sewers that my website has afforded me the ability to connect with.

I apologize that this post has come after the announcement of my new blog via the Sewitup.com e-newsletter! The e-mail was released a few hours earlier than I intended!

4 comments:

  1. Hey Lorene!!!
    I am excited about your new blog!!
    Can't wait for the retreat in November....glad I signed on early..everyone is goint to want in!!!
    See you soon..Mary Lynn

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  2. Im so looking forward to November. September retreat was great! I will finish my jacket and model it for you. My sister is joining us in November. I've told her all about the niht owls! See you soon.

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  3. Lorene (and the weather) just want to make me sit home and sew, sew, sew. I hope to make one of your retreats in 2010. Let us know when you have your schedule ready.

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  4. Lorene, welcome to Houston, will see you at the Quilt show, can't wait to see the kits. Sorry I will not make it for the retreat this year but, will continue to visit your web site and will be there next one

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