Episode 09: Pam Mahshie
Pam grew up watching her mother sew dresses for her and her sister and was in fifth grade she she started taking sewing seriously. She recounts going to a sewing class with her mother where the teacher was a manager of a French design workshop in France, and how exciting it was to learn about the evolution of sewing. But wasn’t until Pam graduated high school and attended the MATC program that she fell in love with the serger.
Pam describes the MATC program as an intense, well-rounded program that not only taught her about sewing, but also how to develop professional skills and hone them for business. She still keeps in touch with one of her professors who was instrumental in helping her and several other students get into the sewing industry. She fondly recalls going into her first classroom in 1982, and seeing this funny little machine sitting on a table. It was there that her love of serging began. (5:18-7:35)
Pam calls her sewing room her happy place. One of her favorite things to sew is christening gowns or baptismal gowns. She shares the story of the time when a friend of her mother’s asked her to create a christening dress for her granddaughter using her wedding dress. As she was taking the dress apart, a piece of rice from her wedding dress fell out. This inspired Pam to also make a pillow for the grandmother, using the rice and the colors of her wedding. As she points out, this is just one of the many stories of how you can use your talent to truly bless other people. (11:09-13:10)
Pam is passionate about teaching others, and it shows. She shares the joy she feels in helping someone go from eyes growing wide with fear at the mere mention of sergers to the exhilaration of discovering a whole new level of creativity. She talks about the many ways the new generation of sergers, like the BERNINA L Series, simplifies and expands the creative process with things like off-the-edge stitching, the use decorative threads, piping, inserting lace in an heirloom piece, and countless other techniques and processes. What used to take three or four different steps can now be done in one, like sewing and stitching and overcasting. She equates people learning to sew using new technologies to how it was when we went from hand sewing to sewing on a machine. The lesson she says, is that there are always new ways of learning and new opportunities that we need to keep our minds open to. (15:02-17:57)
Talk about thinking outside the box: In April, Pam created a raincoat for Earth Day using recycled shopping bags from neighborhood shops. When word got out in the neighborhood that she was looking for colorful bags from a certain children’s clothing stores, young girls in the neighborhood started bringing them to her. She describes the process of cutting blocks of color, fusing interfacing on the back side of the plastic bags, and using black garbage bags from her garage for the sashing, and lining the coat with cotton fabric. She describes the finished product as cute and comfortable and way to help preserve the earth. (22:05-24:54)
According to Pam “When you do something you love to do it comes from within. Which is why I feel I’ve never worked a day in my life.”
To learn more about serging or Pam, simply stop by her instagram and Facebook pages. But first, be sure to listen to our podcast with Pam. It could open up a whole new world of sewing possibilities.