Category Archives: design

My mom was a seamstress. She specialized in facy-dress children’s clothing, working out of her home for several years. In 1983, when I was eight years old, she opened a small shop named Rainbow Crafts. Rainbow Crafts was a very successful specialty shop which sold handcrafted items, including stuffed animals, dolls, and clothing. Within a year my mom expanded to include consignment sales as well. While my mom ran the register, I kept the shelves and racks straightened.

Rainbow Crafts remained a successful business, until three years later when tragedy struck, and my mom was hospitalized. Unfortunatly my mom had run her store by herself, totally on her own. There were no employees, no managers, no accountants, no investors, no staff of any kind. There was no one to take over the store when she became ill, so it was shut down, at first temporarily with plans to reopen was she regained her health. Years past, five, ten, twenty, and at no time was she not in and out of the hospitals, and so plans to reopen Rainbow Crafts faded away, while the store itself ran into disrepair. Over the years my career goals had always evolved around the plan to reopen my mom’s shop.

In the meantime, there was always the frustration at not being able to find stores that sold cloths to fit my tastes. It has always been difficult to find cloths to fit my style. Local store simple did not carry them. If I wanted to wear the cloths I liked, my options were to order them at outrageous prices from designers in Europe, or make them myself. I choose to make them myself. As a result, by the age of twelve, I was degining my own fashions, creating the patterns, and sewing and wearing the cloths I really wanted to wear. At the age of fourteen I enrolled in a two-year course in Fashion Design and Merchandising, and graduated at the age of sixteen. Today, nineteen years later, I still make all of my own cloths from my own designs.

As a teenage I had big dreams of reopening my mom’s shop, this time it would be not a craft store, but a design studio. Over the years, the building had fallen into disrepair, so I set out to rebuild and remodel it. Like my mom, I had set out to do it all on my own, without any help from anyone, and so with hammer and nails and brush and paint I set to work rebuilding the shop. I sanded, painted, and hammered every spare chance I could get. However, the shop always seemed more a dream than a reality, and so it often got pushed aside when life stepped in my path, and repars to the shop were thus drawn out over a period of nearly twenty years.

It was a dream that was not to be, a hurrican drestoied most of the building.

My mom was a seamstress. She specialized in facy-dress children’s clothing, working out of her home for several years. In 1983, when I was eight years old, she opened a small shop named Rainbow Crafts. Rainbow Crafts was a very successful specialty shop which sold handcrafted items, including stuffed animals, dolls, and clothing. Within a year my mom expanded to include consignment sales as well. While my mom ran the register, I kept the shelves and racks straightened.

Rainbow Crafts remained a successful business, until three years later when tragedy struck, and my mom was hospitalized. Unfortunatly my mom had run her store by herself, totally on her own. There were no employees, no managers, no accountants, no investors, no staff of any kind. There was no one to take over the store when she became ill, so it was shut down, at first temporarily with plans to reopen was she regained her health. Years past, five, ten, twenty, and at no time was she not in and out of the hospitals, and so plans to reopen Rainbow Crafts faded away, while the store itself ran into disrepair. Over the years my career goals had always evolved around the plan to reopen my mom’s shop.

In the meantime, there was always the frustration at not being able to find stores that sold cloths to fit my tastes. It has always been difficult to find cloths to fit my style. Local store simple did not carry them. If I wanted to wear the cloths I liked, my options were to order them at outrageous prices from designers in Europe, or make them myself. I choose to make them myself. As a result, by the age of twelve, I was degining my own fashions, creating the patterns, and sewing and wearing the cloths I really wanted to wear. At the age of fourteen I enrolled in a two-year course in Fashion Design and Merchandising, and graduated at the age of sixteen. Today, nineteen years later, I still make all of my own cloths from my own designs.

As a teenage I had big dreams of reopening my mom’s shop, this time it would be not a craft store, but a design studio. Over the years, the building had fallen into disrepair, so I set out to rebuild and remodel it. Like my mom, I had set out to do it all on my own, without any help from anyone, and so with hammer and nails and brush and paint I set to work rebuilding the shop. I sanded, painted, and hammered every spare chance I could get. However, the shop always seemed more a dream than a reality, and so it often got pushed aside when life stepped in my path, and repars to the shop were thus drawn out over a period of nearly twenty years.

It was a dream that was not to be, a hurrican drestoied most of the building.

My mom was a seamstress. She specialized in facy-dress children’s clothing, working out of her home for several years. In 1983, when I was eight years old, she opened a small shop named Rainbow Crafts. Rainbow Crafts was a very successful specialty shop which sold handcrafted items, including stuffed animals, dolls, and clothing. Within a year my mom expanded to include consignment sales as well. While my mom ran the register, I kept the shelves and racks straightened.

Rainbow Crafts remained a successful business, until three years later when tragedy struck, and my mom was hospitalized. Unfortunatly my mom had run her store by herself, totally on her own. There were no employees, no managers, no accountants, no investors, no staff of any kind. There was no one to take over the store when she became ill, so it was shut down, at first temporarily with plans to reopen was she regained her health. Years past, five, ten, twenty, and at no time was she not in and out of the hospitals, and so plans to reopen Rainbow Crafts faded away, while the store itself ran into disrepair. Over the years my career goals had always evolved around the plan to reopen my mom’s shop.

In the meantime, there was always the frustration at not being able to find stores that sold cloths to fit my tastes. It has always been difficult to find cloths to fit my style. Local store simple did not carry them. If I wanted to wear the cloths I liked, my options were to order them at outrageous prices from designers in Europe, or make them myself. I choose to make them myself. As a result, by the age of twelve, I was degining my own fashions, creating the patterns, and sewing and wearing the cloths I really wanted to wear. At the age of fourteen I enrolled in a two-year course in Fashion Design and Merchandising, and graduated at the age of sixteen. Today, nineteen years later, I still make all of my own cloths from my own designs.

As a teenage I had big dreams of reopening my mom’s shop, this time it would be not a craft store, but a design studio. Over the years, the building had fallen into disrepair, so I set out to rebuild and remodel it. Like my mom, I had set out to do it all on my own, without any help from anyone, and so with hammer and nails and brush and paint I set to work rebuilding the shop. I sanded, painted, and hammered every spare chance I could get. However, the shop always seemed more a dream than a reality, and so it often got pushed aside when life stepped in my path, and repars to the shop were thus drawn out over a period of nearly twenty years.

It was a dream that was not to be, a hurrican drestoied most of the building.