20 Years of Sewing: How a Pirate Vest Started Everything
This November marks twenty years since I first started sewing. I didn’t know it at the time, but one small project — a simple pirate vest I made for a friend’s 13th birthday party — would end up shaping the next two decades of my life.
It was 2005, and we were going to Pirate’s Dinner Adventure. I wanted something fun to wear, so I decided to make a vest. I didn’t know how to draft patterns back then, so I traced one of my shirts to get the basic three-piece shape. My mom had shown me how to use the sewing machine for straight and zigzag stitches, so I did what I knew: sew the seams, fold the edges, and zigzag everything down.
I found some ribbon and used it for the front lacing. Then I discovered an eyelet punch in my mom’s craft stash. I had no idea how to use it properly. Some of the eyelets bent, some fell out, and nothing lined up perfectly, but when I finished, I held something I had made with my own hands. And more importantly: I was going to wear it in public.
I don’t have a photo of that vest (I wish I did. Maybe it’s still buried somewhere at my parents’ house), but I do still have the pirate hat I bought that night. I remember standing in the gift shop debating whether to get it. Did I know I was going to go all-in on pirate costumes? That it would become a defining part of my identity? Probably not. But I bought the hat anyway, and I wore it again and again over the next several years. That hat became part of who I was long before I ever realized sewing would be too.
In September of the following year, I started high school, and I quickly became known as the pirate girl. I joined the school’s art academy program — just a regular high school with a multi-year art track — and Pirates of the Caribbean showed up everywhere in my projects. I wasn’t the sketching kid, but POTC still appeared in collages, assignments, and in the piles of magazine clippings and posters I collected for my binder and bedroom wall. Yes, my bedroom walls became covered in pirate pics. I bought every piece of merch I could get my hands on.
I made more costumes over the next few years, like Giselle and Elizabeth Swann, but back then I still didn’t think of myself as a cosplayer. I wasn’t performing or becoming the character. I was just making costumes and wearing them, like dressing up for fun. I didn’t step into a persona or act; I just loved the feeling of creating something and then putting it on.
In the art program, everyone had something they were known for — maybe you were into drawing superheroes, or a huge fan of a band. You could look at a piece of work and knew which student made it. And pirates was my thing, which led to making costumes becoming my thing, even though I didn’t have a word for it yet.
Now it’s twenty years later. Today, cosplay is my thing, but it took me a long time to feel comfortable saying that. Sewing is still the most grounding, satisfying, identity-defining part of who I am. And in the last year, everything has come full circle: my friend and I cosplayed together at PAX, and now we’re working on builds for ECCC and BlizzCon. She wants to get into making her own costumes, and I’ve been helping her get set up with tools and supplies — the same way my mom helped me back then.
I didn’t know, standing in that gift shop holding a pirate hat, that it would lead here. I just liked the feeling of making something and wearing it proudly. But that decision changed my life.
Here’s to twenty years of sewing, and to many more decades of creating, crafting, and wearing something made by hand.
Up Next
I’m working on a two-part beginner series:
- What to Buy When You’re Just Starting Out
- My Tools & Why I Use Them
If you’re new to sewing or cosplay and want to start making things, stay tuned.