Jaemi Seville — Workshop Notebook
Hello, and welcome to my corner of the workshop.
I'm Jaemi—a maker, pattern-drafting enthusiast, and lifelong appreciator of old things that can be repaired, repurposed, or given a second life. This site is my workshop notebook, project archive, and creative garden: a place to track what I make, what I'm learning, and the occasional wonderfully strange idea.
My interests have grown into a wide web of interconnected crafts. What began with an interest in knitting developed into a full-blown passion for fiber arts. I had a background in sewing from highschool, and gained a renewed interest in knitting durring the start of the COVID pandemic. From there I learned about spinning, natural dyeing, pattern design, and now I have an increasing curiosity for pottery, sculpting, and woodworking.
My journey seriously began June of 2023, when my (at the time fiance, now husband) purchased my first antique spinning wheel. Since then, it has become one of the central threads at the core of my personality.
I work across several fiber disciplines, at varying skill levels: sewing, knitting, spinning, tatting, nalbinding, felting, and other traditional textile techniques. I'm especially interested in the intersection of practical clothing, historical craft, and individual creativity.
There's something wonderfully satisfying about taking a raw material and watching it become something useful through a long chain of small decisions. Fiber becomes yarn. Yarn becomes fabric. Fabric becomes a garment. Then this garment eventually becomes something that can be repaired and worn again.
That process fascinates me.
I'm particularly drawn to making rather than merely consuming. I enjoy drafting patterns, altering existing ones, experimenting with construction, repairing old equipment, and understanding why something works the way it does. I'm perfectly happy spending an unreasonable amount of time trying to understand one tiny mechanical problem if it means finding a better solution.
Sewing has become one of my biggest creative pursuits, especially the design side.
I'm interested in pattern drafting, flat pattern development, garment construction, fitting, grading, historical patterns, and modifying existing designs. I enjoy studying older sewing patterns and figuring out what can be preserved, improved, or adapted for modern wear.
My ideal clothing lives somewhere between historical practicality, comfortable everyday wear, and a little bit of cottagecore eccentricity.
I like garments with shape and substance: dresses, pinafores, blouses, substantial skirts, useful pockets, sensible waistbands, and details that make a piece feel deliberately constructed rather than disposable. I'm fond of vintage silhouettes, but I'm not interested in making historical costumes for the sake of accuracy. I want clothing that feels connected to its history while still being something a person could actually live in.
I'm also drawn to the challenge of taking something old and making it useful again. That might mean reviving a vintage pattern, combining elements from several patterns, drafting something completely original, or turning thrifted fabric into a garment with a completely different purpose.
One of my recurring themes is Mirroring & Mimicry—looking at an existing garment and working backward to understand how it was constructed. There's a certain level of detective-work to it that I thoroughly enjoy.
Part of my sewing education has involved learning not just how to sew, but how to understand the tools themselves.
I've spent time working with older sewing machines—cleaning and lubricating them, investigating mechanical problems, and learning what makes different machines suited to different fabrics. I like machines with history behind them, particularly when they can be kept running rather than discarded. I have an old Domestic, but I am still looking for the perfect mannual, foot pedal Singer.
The same philosophy applies to tools as it does to fabric:
Maintain it. Understand it. Repair it. Use it until it truly cannot be used anymore.
I'm interested in sewing as a practical craft, not merely a decorative one. Heavy fabrics, workwear construction, sturdy seams, historical techniques, hand finishing, alterations, and clever solutions all interest me.
Knitting was one of the great gateways into the wider world of fiber.
I enjoy the combination of brain-testing mathematics, garment structure, stitch texture, and patience involved in knitting. I've spent a good deal of time experimenting with gauge, shaping, construction, and adapting existing patterns. I particularly enjoy modifying designs until the finished garment actually fits the person wearing it, instead of merely matching the measurements printed on a pattern, which is still a work in progress. I am far from a master knitter!
Spinning has opened an entirely different part of that world.
I'm fascinated by old spinning wheels and traditional spinning systems, especially the engineering hidden inside them. Antique and unusual wheels, hand-powered mechanisms, drive bands, tension systems, and historical spinning practices all appeal to me.
The older the mechanism and the stranger the engineering, the more likely I am to become interested.
I'm also exploring other textile traditions: tatting, nalbinding, felting, and other forms of handwork. I like crafts that preserve techniques developed long before modern mass production—techniques that still make sense when practiced today.
Natural dyeing is another area I keep returning to because it combines several of my favorite things at once: textiles, chemistry, history, experimentation, plants, and a little bit of mystery.
I'm interested in historical dyeing methods, natural dye sources, mordants, fermentation processes, and the sometimes surprising results that come from extracting color from natural materials.
I love the idea that a piece of cloth can carry a little bit of the landscape with it.
Natural dyes also fit neatly into my broader interest in making use of what is already available. I'm much more interested in discovering what a material can become than in immediately buying something new.
A recurring philosophy throughout my work is reuse.
I like thrifted fabric, old patterns, worn garments, leftover scraps, rescued tools, vintage notions, and materials that other people have decided are no longer useful.
There's something deeply satisfying about looking at an object that has reached the end of its original intended life and asking:
"What else could this become?"
That question is probably responsible for an unreasonable number of my projects. Sometimes the answer is practical. Sometimes it's experimental. Sometimes it's simply fun.
Either way, I would rather learn how to transform something than automatically replace it.
Although fiber arts are the foundation of my practice, I don't intend for them to be the end of it.
I'm beginning to explore pottery, sculpting, and woodworking—three areas where I am much more of a beginner. That's part of the appeal.
There's a particular kind of freedom in learning a craft before you know enough to become overly concerned about doing it "correctly." You get to experiment, make mistakes, discover what the material wants to do, and slowly develop your own methods and techniques.
I'm especially interested in how these crafts can connect back to the textile work I already do.
Woodworking can produce tools, looms, spindles, shelves, and useful workshop objects. Clay can become buttons, beads, vessels, sculptural forms, or entirely new experiments. Sculpting can lead into figures, mannequins, decorative objects, molds, and whatever strange ideas wander into the workshop next.
I don't want to keep my crafts in separate boxes. I want them to mingle.
This website is my permanent workshop record.
Here I'll document and showcase the things I make, including:
Some projects will be polished. Some will be strange. Some will fail spectacularly. All of them are part of the record.
I like keeping the process visible because the finished object is only one part of making. The failed attempts, odd experiments, accidental discoveries, pattern alterations, construction problems, and little bits of accumulated knowledge are often the most interesting parts.
At its heart, I make because I like understanding how things work.
I like taking something apart conceptually and figuring out how it was constructed. I like learning old techniques and seeing which ones still have a place in modern life, slowing down and enjoying the process and the art. I like materials that require patience. I like tools with history. I like practical objects that are also beautiful, unique, hand-crafted.
Perhaps most of all, I like the feeling of being able to say:
"I made this."
Not because it's flawless. Not because it's especially valuable, or I want to brag... but because I learned something, worked with my hands, solved a problem, and turned a collection of materials into something that did not exist before.
That's what this little archive is for.
A record of what I'm learning, what I'm making, what I'm rescuing, and what I'm dreaming up next.
So come wander around the workshop with me, sip some tea, settle in.
There's probably yarn somewhere that needs untangling, a vintage pattern waiting to be dissected, a dye pot quietly doing something suspicious, and at least one crow supervising from the rafters.
— Jaemi
A tiny note on tools and methods.
This website is hand-coded in HTML & CSS and hosted on Neocities. All photographs and creations herein are my own unless otherwise noted.
In the workshop:
If it's broken, I try to fix it. If it's old, I try to understand and repair or repurpose it. If it can be made by hand, I'd rather make it than buy it.