In 2020, Leila Knoll, 32, was living in Kanab and working at the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, when she decided to make a jacket out of a thrifted peach-colored quilt. It was the pandemic and she was home all the time with little to do.
What started as a pandemic pastime has become a more serious pursuit.
Since making that jacket, Knoll has lived in many cities across the United States and in Canada, and completed several degrees — and she has amassed more than 60,000 followers on Instagram, where she documents her sewing process and clothing that she’s created.
While Knoll pursued her career as a veterinarian, she found community and interesting design online.
“When I first started, I felt like there wasn’t anyone that looked like me in the sewing world,” Knoll said. “But then I started an Instagram, and I started finding all these people that were my age with a similar style.”
The quilted jacket now hangs on a mannequin in Knoll’s sunny sewing room in her Salt Lake City home — from where she works remotely examining wildlife disease data for the Navajo Nation.
Knoll is one of many in the Salt Lake area’s young “sewists.”
Sewists, a portmanteau of artist and sewer, are a diverse group. They are doctors, architects, climbers and trail runners. They see sewing as a creative outlet and opportunity to bypass the environmental waste of the fashion industry. Instead of trying to fit into a poorly sized garment, sewers can make clothes that are perfectly tailored to their own bodies.
“Sewing has really had new life, brought to it by a bunch of younger people sewing,” said Delaney Dangerfield, the 28-year-old owner of the Sugar House sewing store Sewciety. “And I really feel like a lot of that is the result of so much online community building.”
Bringing sewers together
Dangerfield decided to open Sewciety in October 2020 to create the kind of store she dreamed of shopping in. Today, the store is filled with technical fabrics for making backpacks and other outdoor gear, colorful swimsuit materials and more traditional linens.
She offers sewing classes, and each February throws a fundraising party called “Frocktails” featuring a fashion show of self-made garments.
There are many reasons why many of her customers are drawn to sewing, Dangerfield said. “A lot of clothes off the rack are not going to fit most people,” Dangerfield said, “and it’s also very cheaply made. And that’s before you even start to talk about the ethics and sustainability side of it.”
In “Me Made May,” Dangerfield will host a kick-off party for the monthlong challenge to only wear garments that were made by the sewers.
Outdoors and crafting combine
Within that niche of young people designing and sewing their own garments, Knoll has found an even more specialized group in Salt Lake City: Sewers who are avid climbers.
Knoll also climbs outside and in the gym, and designed her own climbing pants with extra room and fabric reinforcements around the knee. She is working on her first pattern for the pants — which she plans to sell.
“I wanted to offer something that not everyone else is offering,” she explained.
There are many sewers in the Salt Lake area making their own gear, Dangerfield said. People make backpacks, hiking clothes and bike packing bags. Dangerfield started with a trail running bag, and her store’s section of technical fabrics is growing.
“It’s kind of fun to feel like your own R&D department,” Dangerfield said.
A transformed closet
The ability to customize clothes to her own measurements, choose her own fabrics and modify designs has turned a casual hobby of altering ready-made items into a full-fledged passion for Knoll.
At her local coffee shop, a barista recognized her and complimented the Carhartt workwear jacket she wore and had recently posted about.
In the home that she shares with her partner, two dogs and two cats, Knoll has managed to build a life full of all her different interests — from animals to climbing to pattern creation.
She has sewn nearly every item in her closet — which is filled with flowing dresses, coats, swimsuits and even handmade sandals. A spacious room adjacent to the living room serves as her sewing studio and home office. Dozens of stacks of neatly folded fabrics line one wall. Her two huge dogs — Sug and Nico — like to lay in the sun while she stands at a large table in the center of the room cutting and measuring fabrics.
She no longer has to follow pattern instructions to a T.
On a recent road trip, Knoll stopped into a Target store and tried on a few items and realized they “made me feel sad” because they fit so poorly.
“You’re not supposed to fit into clothes,” Knoll said, “clothes are meant to fit you.”
