I recently made a little trip home to my parent's house.

While we were there, one afternoon I had to run a zipper over to Lynette at her shop in Provo, UT.

She showed me around, I tried on her latest designs, and I learned quite a lot.

For example, vintage dresses were designed to be altered?

She had one she'd just finished and showed me how they used to sneakily layer the lining to expose the side seams to make altering easy.  Needless to say, Lynette loves when customers bring in vintage dresses.

I learned invisible zippers were invented in the 70s.  She showed me this dress she bought at the thrift store, not because it was cute, but because it was a little piece of history, being so old and having an original invisible zipper.  Must have been cutting edge when it was designed.

The last thing I knew about before-hand and wanted to see. 

Her backup industrial sewing machine is a Singer.

It has a crazy stitch width--10 mm wide.

That's double standard sewing machines, and just looking at the gaping wide hole in the presser foot was crazy.  Too bad she had to get back to work, I'd have liked to sewn something with this bad boy.

I wish I'd taken photos of all the interesting things, but all I have is a photo back when she first opened her shop last winter.

It's great to have a mom and little sister who know so much about sewing to teach me along the way!