(upbeat music) - Next on "You Oughta Know".

From grandmom crafts like quilting to the meditative art of Zentangle, and upcycling something old into something new.

Many are finding their passion for crafting.

(upbeat music) Welcome to "You Oughta Know" I'm Shirley Min.

I'm inside At My House, not my actual house, that's not what I mean.

At My House is a shop on Fabric Row that sells vintage and locally made wares from area crafters.

Fun fact; crafting in America is on the rise.

In the next 30 minutes, we're gonna introduce you to some of those crafters, like the creative mind behind Booty!

Beret!, a knitwear line that's sold right here.

(upbeat music) - I've been working on the knitting machine for about four years.

It's really fun and it's a fun hobby.

(upbeat music) There's always something wonky with every machine and you kind of have to learn your machine to get it going.

I got into knitting machines because basically with a knitting machine, you can actually make the fabric itself.

The machine just speeds it up so it makes larger projects way more accessible.

Instead of working with two needles, you're working with a bed, a flat bed of needles.

You can actually shape stuff and the shaping is I think, where the real magic happens on a knitting machine.

I like a little sassy scarf and I played around a lot with different shapes.

Using a knitting machine has given me like the ability to design rarer shapes, which is kind of fun.

- [Min] Bea is creating garments for her knitwear line, Booty!

Beret!.

- With Booty!

Beret!, I sell a lot of winter accessories, so scarves and hoods and just variations of those.

I haven't gotten into full sweaters yet, but maybe one day.

It's a lot about texture, I like soft things, so it's fun to make soft stuff that I want to wear.

I also love experimenting with colors that you don't often get to see in stores.

I like to use like bright colors and funky colors because why not have fun with wearing different colors?

But I do write down my patterns as I go so I can look back 'cause it's hard to read this so I have to take notes of what I did when.

I do have just like notebooks full of patterns that I write in shorthand.

I think of it as art.

It's fun wearable art, you don't have to take life too seriously.

You can wear a pop of color and a silly pattern, it's fun.

- [Min] What do you get out of this?

- It's difficult and I messed up a lot of times and I continue to mess up a lot of times, but that's what learning is.

Oh, rats!

Growing up, I've always just been interested in art and I think of myself as an artist.

As a person, the time I feel happiest is when I'm creating and coming up with new ideas and making new things.

That's why I do it, it's 'cause I love making art.

- Once a month, Emily Joynton of Loop 306 sets up right here with her chain stitching machine.

Let's learn more about this sewing and embroidery technique from Emily herself.

(upbeat music) - Chain stitching began in the late 18 hundreds, used in a more industrial sense.

Now you see it as a way to add illustration while also personalization to fabric items, a lot of clothing like what I'm wearing here, 306 is like a roadway in San Angelo, Texas, which is my hometown.

It is an alternative to digital embroidery, which like a digital machine embroidery, you would basically create a design or just use a design that has been created by someone else, plug it into a machine and like press a button.

With chain stitching, you really have the human element there, being able to use your own hand to guide the machine.

So I feel like I'm drawing with thread, which is a really fun aspect of it.

I worked in-house as a textile designer and also as an in-house illustrator and now in full-time freelance, have tried to find different ways of using my illustration in unique forms.

This is the process of each project that I create in my studio here.

I wanted to make these tote bags for Fabric Row.

I'm hoping to sell these on Fabric Row Fourth Street.

I'll create the lettering and then make an outline and then print this entire sheet on a large format printer I have downstairs onto stabilizer paper, which is what I then adhere to the fabric item.

I'll just like tape it right on top and I will basically use this as a way to trace.

So you can see here how I've done the initial outline for this tote bag here and then this would be the final product.

I also added Philadelphia underneath there.

It's kind of like tracing, whenever I print out these templates, these are my original designs, so I'm basically tracing my own work.

Same sort of thing here.

I'll create all these little motifs, this is for Boot Barn in Wilmington, Delaware.

So I've got some like nice western motifs, things that are easy enough for me to stitch in the moment and also something that I can do in a continuous line.

Then I will do the same thing, I'll print that on stabilizer paper.

This has the stabilizer paper still on it.

I'll stitch just right on top like I'm tracing it.

This was another flash sheet I created and then this is the final product of that.

I did this jacket for my friend Priyanka and it's a jacket she already had and didn't wear that often and she was like, "I would love for you to put something on here to make it a piece that I do wanna wear."

And she works for public schools and I was able to essentially like upcycle this piece that she might have just given away otherwise.

I spend a lot of hours on my machine every day as often as I can, but I also work outside of my studio.

(upbeat music) I have a little travel table where I can just put it in my little hatchback and drive out to either a local shop or somewhere even outside of the state and set up in a store and be able to interact directly with clients.

Hi!

- Welcome.

- I am hoping to have a jumpsuit stitched by you.

- Then they can get that on the spot on a fabric item.

Oh, the Popsicle is really cute.

- Emily has a flash sheet that she's made specifically for my shop, At My House, every fourth Friday of the month, each store on Fourth Street does different like events.

Starting at 4:00 PM, Emily comes and she has chain stitching for basically anyone who wants to come and bring in their pieces or people can buy something from the store and get it chain stitched.

There was an upcycling element to it, which I loved and she loved as well.

- I really appreciate when people understand the value of the time and the work and the learning that goes into this.

It's great, the excitement people have around something that is kind of like the definition of like slow fashion, sustainable fashion where you're taking existing pieces and making them into something new.

(upbeat music) - All good.

- Wow, that was so fast and it's so cute!

My friends are gonna be so jealous.

Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.

- Of course.

I love the recognition that all craft is getting for the time and the skill and the handy work that goes into it that is valued in a way that maybe it hasn't been in the recent past.

- Thank you so much.

- You're welcome.

- Kelly Braun, owner of At My House joins me now.

Kelly, good to see you.

- Hi.

- We saw you in the last segment with Emily Joynton.

Does Emily come here every fourth Friday of the month with her chain stitching machine?

- Yes, for the months of summer, she's gonna be here every fourth Friday.

- I love it, and you got your jacket stitched.

- Yes, of course.

- Let's see it.

- Yeah.

- It's so cute!

I love the chain stitching.

- Yeah, same.

Yeah, it's great.

- Why is it important to you to have locally crafted, locally made things in your shop?

- Well, individually made pieces are just more interesting, just cooler than stuff that's mass produced.

It's the same reason why I like vintage.

- Because it's cool to say this is vintage.

- Yeah, exactly, like, I mean it's, yeah, it's the same thing.

Like if something is one of a kind, so if it's vintage or handmade, someone asks you where it's from, you can be like, oh, it's vintage you, I mean you can try and find it, but... (laughter) - Well, how do you find all of the local artists and crafters whose items you sell?

- It's a bunch of different ways.

So sometimes, people will literally be in the store and I'll admire something they're wearing and I find out they made it and then we'll talk and things go from there.

Sometimes I'll go to markets and find people.

Other times, it's a friend of a friend.

Sometimes people contact me, it could be any way.

- So it's really organic in that way.

The store is also a community space.

You have a mini art show on one of the walls.

Why did you want that to be part of At My House?

- People really want community oriented workshops and events right now.

When I first moved to a Philly, it was something I was constantly looking for, that was 13 years ago.

I've just noticed the more I do them, the more people respond to them and it's something that I find I didn't initially set out to do, but it's become really important to me to have.

- And I think that response has let you know that maybe there was a need there.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Talk to me about the crafting community just because I know you have a lot of interaction with the crafting community.

Describe that community for me here in Philly.

- It's really close knit, I mean, no pun intended.

I feel like people, if they don't know each other directly, they know of each other.

Like whether it's like people at like markets or you just come across items the same way I do, I think everyone kind of eventually comes into each other's circle.

- I'm hearing the community is growing in Philly.

Do you find that to be true also?

- I do, yeah.

It's kind of very similar to the vintage community in Philly.

Everyone is super welcoming, we are all friends and it's very similar in the crafting community where everyone kind of lifts each other up.

- Kelly, thank you so much for having me.

- Of course.

- And I love that At My House is so much more than just a store.

So I wanna invite you come on by to Fabric Row and check out At My House and say hi to Kelly while you're at it.

- Please, yeah.

- Thanks again for having us.

- Of course.

What's old is new again when it comes to vintage shopping and upcycling.

Now let's meet a Lansdowne seamstress who reuses fabrics and materials and transforms them into treasures.

(upbeat music) - My business is called Useful and Beautiful Upcycled Handmade and the business name came about from a William Morris quote and the quote is, "Have nothing in your home that you don't know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

I started out when I was really small, sewing anything I could figure out how to put together watching my grandmother.

My grandmother was a quilter, she also did a lot of embroidery.

She taught me that and I think the main thing I learned from her was to just try it, give it a shot, and if it doesn't work, I'll try it a different way next time.

As a kid, I didn't have access to new supplies all the time, so I would take things apart and remake them.

I had the world's best dressed Barbie family and it also worked with my taking apart clothing to make other things because I got a really good sense young of how things were put together.

Flat fabric into three dimensional shapes and as a high schooler, and when I first started working, I made a lot of my own wardrobe because I couldn't find things that I liked.

At some point, I started making other things as gifts for people and that's really where the handmade and upcycle business came from.

I work with machines and hand sewing.

I have an embroidery machine that does like faces for the dolls that I do, but all the finished work is done by hand because I like to put a little of myself in it once the machine process is done.

I make a lot of soft toys, teddy bears, regular ones that are child friendly and also jointed ones that are more heirloom pieces.

I make dolls which have embroidered faces and they actually include some of the only fabrics that I purchase for flesh tones.

So I buy the skin color fabrics to make sure that I cover everybody.

Even though parents usually wanna buy a doll that looks like the child and the child wants the doll that looks the exact opposite from them.

I started out selling in 2013 with Craft Show in West Philadelphia.

It expanded from there.

The first shop I started working with, was Philadelphia Independence in Old City.

They're a great shop, it's all handmade makers from Philadelphia and the vicinity.

I think they just passed their 10th anniversary.

It's wonderful having a store that's always there selling things for me.

I really appreciate how much help they've been over the years.

Upcycling does keep prices lower than a lot of handmade artists because my material costs are really low.

A lot of times they're out of my own closet or when my friends clean out, I come home to a bag on my front step.

A different form of creativity, looking at a pile of remnants and going, what does it wanna be next?

Because the answer's different every time.

It is important to keep this kind of tradition going, especially since it's not really being taught in school anymore.

I at least would like to give a lot of adults I know a class on how to do basic repairs because nobody knows how to fix something when the most elementary thing goes wrong.

(upbeat music) I always love with "The Sound of Music," Maria, looking at those curtains and you could just see the little thought bubble appearing over her head, and that's how I look at certain things.

I have friends who when I compliment something they're wearing, they're like, "You can't have it, not yet anyway."

Like, well, I will remind you when you're tired of it that I wanna do something with that.

- A grandmom craft from the past is having a resurgence.

New Jersey's Early Girl Quilts has what you need to begin your quilting journey.

(upbeat music) - My business partner Sharon is my sister-in-law and she was making beautiful quilts.

It's very creative building a quilt with all the different color fabrics and the prints is an artistic process.

- Two different ways fat quarters can be folded for cutting.

- Also, it's very fulfilling to make something for someone else and hand it over and see them enjoy it.

- We're using what we call the hamburger style tonight, which is short and stubby versus hotdog, which is long and skinny.

- It's a skill that has been through the generations, something that women have learned, primarily women, but also men where they've taken scraps of fabric left over from sewing their clothing or their curtains to not waste, to put those fabrics together and make something else that's beautiful by putting the little pieces together.

They're coming in with their stacks of fabric tonight and the first step in making the quilt, they'll take each of the fabrics and follow the pattern directions, how to cut the pieces that they need to put together for the quilt.

So tonight, we'll be teaching them how to cut.

So you've snipped, now you're gonna flip.

Using a rotary cutter and a ruler, 'cause you're going through four layers, it'll be perfect.

And making little stacks of fabric that they will then take and start sewing together.

And then you take two squares that you've sewn together with and sew them to another two squares and build a bigger block.

And then you sew all your blocks together to make the front of the quilt.

So you move from piecing to quilting where you sandwich a quilt front and a fabric that you've chosen for the back with padding in between, and then you quilt them together.

The stitches that actually hold the whole thing together is that's when you actually do the quilting.

And then the last part of the process is to trim up your quilt and pick a fabric that's gonna bind the edge of the quilt and you sew the binding on and then you have your completed quilt.

For me, making the quilt, if it's for someone when I'm making it and I know who it's for, I think about that person.

Sometimes I pray for that person, it's like that and you think about what would they like?

So when they open the quilt and you see the smile and, and it's something that they love and you think about them enjoying it.

A lot of times when you're thinking of the person, you might put something that they like into it.

There's prints for every person.

So that's sort of how you tell a story.

But once you get more advanced, you might build some curves into the quilt or try to be something more abstract or artistic.

Art quilting is a whole nother level of quilting.

We take them from that level of being able to sew a straight line to building a quilt from start to finish.

So our beginner class takes five weeks and they do all the steps from start to finish to binding the quilt at the end.

And if you can't sew a straight line, you can take a class before quilting called Learn to Sew, and then you learn everything you need.

You create a product that lasts forever that you can hand down to someone.

There's a sense of community from quilting, meeting other women or men who share the same passion as you.

Once you've done a few quilts, you realize the joy is in the process and to just enjoy the process, that's definitely a lesson that I've learned with quilting.

Most of the quilts I make, I'm giving to someone else and I just love that moment when I hand it to them and they know that I took a lot of effort to make something just for them.

You can make place mats, table cloths, table runners.

We teach a lot of bag classes here, we have a great instructor and that's something that's easy to make, to give to others that doesn't take as much effort as a quilt, so they're very popular, the little zipper pouches.

The overall reward of quilting is making something from scratch that didn't exist before, that has a purpose and a place in the world.

(upbeat music) - Focusing the mind while creating is one of the benefits of Zentangle.

This craft utilizes simple strokes to create beauty and mindfulness.

- [Instructor] That's better.

- How did you shade the end?

- Let me show you.

You can do one of two things, you could shade around the whole area.

- My name's Sue Trembeth, I am a certified Zentangle teacher and then blend that out.

I was a nurse for 42 years.

I've always been kind of interested in art.

I did a lot of crafting in my background, I did paper crafting, rubber stamp, art, card making.

And I'd heard about this thing called Zentangle.

COVID hits in 2020 and it was incredibly stressful for me being a nurse during COVID.

I would come home every night and I would draw.

So many teachers were teaching online.

That's really when I learned Zentangle.

Zentangle had a very calming influence on me when I would come home from these really rough days of taking care of patients during COVID.

And it was so relaxing and so meditative, it helped me sleep at night.

I wanna share the beauty of Zentangle with all of you.

There are eight steps to Zentangle, but we're gonna start with the supplies.

Generally, Zentangle teaches with a micron pen, I teach with a PN pen.

The next thing is a pencil.

Some of you have regular pencils, some of you might have one of these short little Zentangle pencils.

It's just a regular pencil, we use this for shading, for adding the "drama".

This little funny thing, it's called a totione, or my students will often call it a a blender or a smudger.

This is for blending out your pencil for the shading.

The last thing I wanna talk about is paper.

This is called Fabriano Tiepolo paper.

It's a gorgeous paper.

It's got a little bit of a tooth to it, it's got a nice weight, it takes to ink really, really well, it takes to graphite really well.

The first step in Zentangle is gratitude and appreciation.

You're gonna take your tile and you'll all have your official tile in front of you.

We're going to start with our pencil and then we will move on to our pen.

So here's your tile.

You're going to put a dot in each corner.

From there, you connect your dots.

We're gonna talk about the tangles.

The tangles are the patterns.

The first tangle that you're going to learn is called crescent moon.

And this is gonna teach us that very important principle of an aura, think of throwing a pebble into a pond and it ripples out.

The next one is called Hollibaugh.

This is gonna teach us the principle of drawing behind.

Florz, Florz is the principle of a grid.

The next one is gonna be a twofer.

Tipple is just a circle, but in Zentangle, we call them orbs.

And the other one's Printemps, Printemps is spring in French.

These are what I like to call the filler tangles.

(upbeat music) Anything is possible one stroke at a time, and that's the beauty of Zentangle.

(upbeat music) On the back of your tile, sign your name, date it.

We start with gratitude and appreciation in Zentangle, and we end with gratitude and appreciation.

It's magic.

- In a busy world, sometimes peace begins with shaping a simple strip of paper into art.

- Quilling's very meditative.

We live in a tough world right now, and to have something, I'm working with my hands, I'm concentrating.

This is my focus when I'm doing my quilling.

What it does is it gives me an escape for what's going on.

For me, doing the quills, having that eye hand coordination, this is what I'm focusing on.

(upbeat music) I love crafting.

I have done all types of crafting, soap making, turning lathe, beading, silversmithing, goldsmithing, just everything.

And I also love quilling.

It's unique, it's versatile, it's just a joy.

(gentle music) Quilling is using strips of paper.

It can be thin strips, it could be wide strips.

And what you do is you create designs with it.

You can just create anything that your mind will let you go to.

(gentle music) You need a quilling tool.

So that's the basic piece that you use to do all your twirls and swirls, which is a thin piece of plastic, metal, and you actually fit the paper into it and you control it.

You need glue, you need tweezers.

So everything starts with a circle.

(upbeat music) You can purchase paper where it's already pre-cut and it comes boxed up, like maybe 50 or 75 strips and you just pull it apart and you can use the strips like that.

But also if you wanna do quilling at a higher level, you can cut your own paper.

I make cards, mostly greeting cards.

You can make posters, you can make home decor, you can make jewelry, There's all sorts of ways that you can use quilling.

People are always looking for ways to express themselves.

And so I definitely see art and crafting.

For me, it's like my feelings coming out and it's like me actually connecting with my art.

(upbeat music) - And that is our show.

Maybe you found a new craft you'd like to take up, I hope so.

I do wanna say a big thank you to Kelly Braun for letting us hang out here at At My House Vintage Clothing and Community Space.

Have a good night everyone.

Bye Kelly.

(upbeat music)