Kathleen Stanley is a natural. Not a baseball player, or someone who can play piano by ear, but a Mt. Desert Island seamstress who started sewing at age four. “No one taught me,” she said. “My mother didn’t sew. I remember sewing with a treadle when I was five, six, seven years old.” Her grandmother, who owned that treadle machine, let the child sew odd pieces of fabric she kept in a trunk and later taught her to knit. Stanley made her first pair of mittens when she was nine. By the time she was in seventh grade, she was making all her dresses and skirts. Asked when she made her first complete outfit, she replied, “I was making bound buttonholes before I got to high school.” Not all readers will appreciate a child taking on the complexities of bound buttonholes, but will surely recognize that by the time Stanley reached adulthood she was an accomplished seamstress. She is now a master at her craft.
She became a business owner by a circuitous route. “Every Saturday when I went to get groceries,” she recalled, “I went to Union River Fabrics to buy fabric to make clothes for the kids or curtains, or whatever.” All her friends sewed and when they’d go to fabric stores together she’d say, “When I have my fabric store, it’s going to be like this.” But it took her youngest child being allergic to all man-made fibers to turn what she called a joke into reality.
Stanley’s daughter needed 100 percent cotton knit fabric for baby clothes, but that was difficult to find, so she bought it in bulk and re-sold what she didn’t need to friends.
This led several friends to suggest she start that store she’d always spoken about, and when two of the three area fabric stores closed, she said, “That kind of forced me into fabric sales.” She’s now in her 19th year of business: 12 at the Trenton location and the last three with an additional shop in Portland.
Stanley’s Trenton shop, Sewing By The Sea, is four miles from Ellsworth set back from Route 3. It occupies the back acreage of her late lobster fisherman father-in-law’s Jordan River waterfront property. Stanley’s husband, Gary, currently a part-time fisherman, is close to retiring from his planning job at Bangor Hydro. When Gary’s father, fisherman and boat builder James Stanley retired in 1997, he gave Gary his boat and gear. Bass Harbor boat builder Chummy Rich is restring the 24-foot wooden Gail Louise. When he finishes, Gary plans to fish full-time using his father’s boat and gear.
Being a fisherman’s wife seems to be part of the ambiance of Sewing By The Sea: along with Stanley, employees Kelly Pratt, of Deer Isle, Mary Jane Staples, of Bar Harbor, and bookkeeper Deanna Davis, of Bass Harbor, are also married to lobstermen. Staples’ husband and son also run a pound where the cook and sell lobster. Deana Davis’ family is, so far, the only family to receive a Working Waterfront Access Pilot Program grant to preserve their property for commercial fishing.
Fishermen’s wives who sew naturally focus on marine subjects. Stanley used Maine’s lighthouses, animals and scenes for a book of Maine motif appliqués she designed and published. She designed and sells kits that include pattern and fabric for sewing handbags, totes, wall hangings, and varied size quilts.
“We’re an old fashioned kind of store where you can go in and get a sewing machine, thread, needle, fabric, pattern, buttons: full service: they way they used to be in the old days. You go into a quilt shop, you’re not going to be able to get clothing patterns. You’ll be lucky if you can get buttons, things for mending and repair. Curtain lining. We have a little bit of everything.” Barely stopping for breath, the energetic Stanley continued, “I’d like to do the same thing in Portland, but our customers want a quilt shop.
What’s more, Stanley offers classes in just about all aspects of sewing except upholstery. She teaches quilting, rug making, knitting, embroidery and aesthetics of design at both her Trenton and Portland stores. Upstairs in the Trenton shop, Stanley has a 14-foot, non-computerized quilting machine. In another area she has a repair shop for sewing machines. She has an AccuCut tool that cuts ten layers of material at a time into strips, squares, triangles, and said she plans to have a die made of the shape of the State of Maine. A cutting table, cutting mat, ironing boards and irons come in handy for students.
Best of all, one evening each month, and more often as Christmas approaches, people can rent space at her shops, bring whatever they’re working on, either hand or machine work, including mending and knitting, and Stanley goes from table to table helping the user.
Here it is, this all-encompassing fabric shop set back from the road on Eastern Maine’s rural coast, yet at Sewing By The Sea, Stanley and her fishermen’s wives work and thrive. “People find us,” Stanley said. “The non-traditional people find us.”
For more information contact: Sewing By The Sea, Route 3, Trenton. (207) 664-2558 and 306 Warren Avenue, in Portland (207) 797-6700
Sandra Dinsmore is a freelance writer who lives in Penobscot. She writes the Lobster Market Report for Commercial Fisheries News.