Meet the Maker – Stitches Amiss

This month’s Meet the Maker is the wicked bag maker, Casey from Stitches Amiss. This awesome bag maker is well known for making bags with an edgy and unique design! Wave hello to Casey and get to know her a little more today!

Tell us a little about yourself.

I am a mother of 3 and married to a US sailor, so we do a bit of moving around. We are avid animal lovers and have four pets, five if you include the fish. I’m commonly heard saying “on this episode of ‘we adopted a zoo’ ” in this house haha!

Well, this is my 3rd year being in business selling by bags but I started out about 5 years ago. I initially wanted to teach myself sewing because we were about to have our last child and first girl, and I really wanted to make her some cute clothing items that were hard for me to find in the style that I liked. I made a few different hobo style bags while teaching myself to sew and then decided to make my own diaper bag. It was a couple of weeks of frustration, many hours of seam ripping, probably one of the hardest things, creatively, that I’d ever taken on. Since then, I haven’t really focused on anything else but bags.

I am sewing fabric for a few fabric designers right now to advertise their prints, as well as my usual custom orders. I also have a new, non – bag product that I’ve been working on that I hope to be able to offer soon, no big details for that yet but I will say if you’re big into planners, you’ll want to keep your eye out! I’ll also be releasing a couple of my self drafted patterns within the next couple of months, by request from a few fellow bag makers.

What do you enjoy the most about bag making?

The challenge! Bags are time consuming and laborious, and that challenge keeps me excited about what I’m creating and makes me feel a real sense of pride when I’ve successfully created something that turns out how I was picturing in my head.

What is one bag making tool that you cannot live without?

I should probably say my seam ripper! But that’s probably true with any type of sewing. The other thing would probably be my my rivet setters; rivets were definitely a big game changer for my bag making capabilities.

Do you have any tips for someone new to bag making?

Just take patterns step by step. A lot of people will dry read through the pattern once, then go back, but I never advise that with bags because if you’re not used to constructing them, everything can seem really confusing and it can kind of lower your confidence from the beginning. Everything might not make sense right away, but if you just go step by step you’ll end up with an awesome new bag to show off.

What has been your proudest creative moment?

So I say this all the time when I post a new bag I’ve made, ‘this is probably my favorite thing I’ve ever made’ and I really do mean it, every time I successfully sew up a pattern I haven’t done before, and it turns out just how I pictured it, my sense of pride just sky rockets.

But if I absolutely had to pick one I’d say that large travel duffel bag in the Ed Hardy fabric, because that is definitely my LARGEST creation, by far, to date. I was really apprehensive about tackling that one.

Check out these links to see more of Casey’s work:

• Facebook: www.facebook.com/stitchesamiss
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/stitches_amiss/
• Etsy: www.etsy.com/shop/stitchesamiss