We are recording today on the traditional ancestral and unceded territories

of the Coast Salish and Kwakwakiwak peoples, including Slaywa Tooth, Squamish,

Musqueam, and Comox First Nations.

Hello and welcome to Love to Sew! I'm Caroline, the owner of Blackbird Favrex,

and I'm Helen, the designer behind Helen's Closet Patterns.

We're two sewing buds who love to sew our own clothes and want to encourage you on your sewing

journey, too. Join us for today's interview with Serena, aka Serena!

Hello Serena, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

We're so excited to chat with you and get to know you. Can you please introduce yourself to our

listeners? Sure. I'm Serena, and I run the Instagram account at Serena

underscore as well as the YouTube channel by the same name without the underscore,

and basically I sew vintage sewing patterns with vintage sewing machines.

I'm from Georgia, so the south, and I learned how to sew pretty much by myself.

I taught myself how to sew, but my grandmother taught me how to use a sewing machine,

like the very basics of a sewing machine, and my mother-in-law taught me how to read my first

pattern, and then with that knowledge I kind of just started sewing and teaching myself

everything else after that. Awesome, and how long ago was that when you first started getting into

sewing? Six years ago? Awesome. Six years ago sewing like clothing and things like that.

I learned how to use the machine maybe a couple years before that, but I was like a teenager.

I was like 18 or 19 when my grandmother showed me how to use a sewing machine, so I was very

impatient, and I thought that because I knew how to like reverse stitch and like stitch straight,

...