SewGood owner Carley Struve has always loved sewing. As a child she sewed clothes for her Barbie dolls, in high school she made her own grad dress and as a mother she sewed all her children’s clothing, even making them custom-fit cloth diapers.
A Certified Dental Assistant by trade Carley decided to take a break from the dental field in 2008, and began teaching kids how to sew. It wasn’t entirely new territory for her—she had previously taught a program called Kids Can Sew during the late 1990s—but it soon began to feel like something she could do long-term.
“A friend of mine at the fabric store said, ‘Carley, you have got to teach adults, we get so many requests.’” Carley recalls. “I had no idea, I just thought people sewed.” Eventually, Carley became so busy teaching adults that she had to step away from teaching children. (She was able to reintroduce kids’ classes in 2013—“now it’s a really nice mix of both kids and adults,” she points out.)
“Sewing has been a dying art, but over the last few years it’s really come back,” says Carley. “I think Project Runway had a lot to do with that. There’s a huge interest in DIY these days, and sewing isn’t offered as much in schools as it used to be. So people are coming to me, wishing they’d learned back then.”
Women in their twenties and thirtiess make up the largest group of SewGood’s clients, but classes do attract both men and women of all ages. “My oldest student was actually a 73-year-old man,” says Carley.
