It’s been a very exciting time in our young company’s life. When we decided to properly ‘make a go’ of this last March (2011), we dreamt of a day where we would have a space to work which we could call our own – and that wouldn’t be wedged between a sofa, a laundry machine and a sink, and littered with household wares.
See what Dave’s leaning up against? Yup- that’s his oven. The fridge is behind me.
Our 1929 Singer is sitting infront of us, along with a pile of keys that came from a shipwreck off the coast of Florida!
For the past year we’ve been sewing out of a kitchen. It started as just the kitchen area – the tile floors are good for cutting; but quickly (and uncontrollably) expanded to taking up every square inch of Dave’s tiny apartment. You couldn’t take a step in any direction without stepping on leather, rivets, or sometimes even tools (ouch!).
This is what it looks like when a leather bomb goes off in a 600 sq ft apartment. Oh, and I’m sewing!
We’ve had fun in our tiny make-shift studio – sewing out of a kitchen has its perks (mainly that there’s a fridge with goodies within arms reach). But it’s also caused its share of headaches and we dreamt of the day we could finally take refuge in a proper commercial space.
Our new home! We’re the middle building – dark green with brown bricks.
On July 1st we are officially located at 41 West 7th Avenue – and we’re so stoked! Moving in bit by bit has been a saga to say the least – but once we’re settled we know it’ll be worth it. Our biggest challenge was finding a space that we could work in comfortably and also afford – thankfully we have two great friends that also happened to be skilled artisans in their own right, and they’re sharing the space with us. Once we actually found the space and signed the lease, things got real.
We bought a hydraulic press, something that’s been on our wish list since we found out about them. It’s a 2-tonne giant ‘cookie cutter’ that lets you stamp out shapes of leather, making it easier to do more intricate bags than when cutting with a blade by hand. Did you read that last sentence? 2 tonnes. If you’re wondering how we could possibly move something that huge, then join the club, we were stumped. We ended up having to lift it with a crane and it only just barely fit through the doorway. Dave spent days building a platform for it to be placed on and wheeled from the entrance of our building to our actual studio space and its final home. Managing not to squish himself into oblivion, Dave got our newest toy settled and we can’t wait to play with it.
Dave maneuvering the crane that’s suspending the 2-tonne press while trying to get it on his custom-made platform.
And this is the moment we had been waiting for with baited breath. If this guy didn’t fit through this door, we would have been screwed. It was a tight fit – tight enough that the top skimmed the ceiling.
So now that we have a proper studio for people to come visit and actually see & touch our pieces, we have to have a party! It’d be bad mojo not to ‘warm’ the place with a proper studio-warming. So stay tuned, we’re planning something for mid August and we hope to see you all there.
And just because I can’t stop laughing everytime I see this – this is Dave riding the pallet jack we used to move the press down the street.