Sarah Tremaine

Sarah Tremaine Design

What’s your story?

I grew up in New England, close to the forest and the sea. I moved to the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains 40 years ago, to study environmental sciences and 20 years ago, I shifted gears and began following my passion for designing Wearable Art using natural dyes, fibers and fabrics.

I am a life-long crafter, environmental scientist and am deeply spiritual. I began my business, part-time, in 2006 and went to full-time in 2016. I am committed to using low-impact processes, using as much local and USA-sourced material as I can and minimizing waste, all while creating wearable art. I sell my work online and in regional art/ craft galleries. I also teach workshops and am just launching my first online Workshop: Become a Home Natural Dyer.

I am a third career artist, meaning that expressing the sum of my scientific, spiritual and artistic life is informing my work, every time I go into the studio. While I have been knitting garments for over thirty years, it has been my love of color and how color resonates with one’s soul that has fundamentally drawn me to nuno felting – a process where the most basic of fibers, roving, is teased, encouraged and lovingly rolled so that it penetrates a silk fabric structure, thus transforming into something new, stronger, translucent – a nuno fabric and at the same time, wondrously, into a garment that fits, drapes and adorns. This discovery of the joy of creating one-of-a-kind nuno felted garments, led me back to color… first hand dyeing my silk and roving, but then my environmental self, kicked in and natural dyeing was the next turn in my evolution.

What are your values?

It is so important to me to create and hand make stylish, comfortable clothing, accessories & home decor that are flattering & healthy for you and for the planet .

I am a fiber artist, working in my farm-studio at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, with hay fields, wild flowers and 38 fruit trees. I design and sustainably hand make garments, accessories, home décor & gifts… for people who love nature. I have a simple, contemporary aesthetic. I work with natural fibers, plant materials and natural fabrics to create garments and accessories using the techniques of botanical printing, nuno felting and sewing. I use natural dyes; the colors are rich, complex and naturally harmonious.

What can we find at Sarah Tremaine Design?

I make garments, accessories, gifts & home decor. I make a body of work and I also create custom garments, which I love doing. We are not one-size-fits-all! Trying on clothes in a store is a game of trying to convince oneself that we can put up with this part being too long/ short, the darts are in the wrong place, its too big/ small… so we can show up at the party/ office/ school and look, mostly, OK?

There is another experience possible. One could buy fewer, better fitting, healthier things. Right? When I make a nuno garment, I use a person’s measurements to make a “pattern” for the resist (and I do make garments for the “rack” using my standard patterns and sizes), but it is a thrilling moment to actually do the final fitting it on a person’s body, lightly patting to encourage additional felting where it is needed. It makes my work very personal, custom, bespoke, slow-manufacturing and how wonderful is that? Not to mention all the fun of finding natural dye colors and blends and the creative steps of creating surface design through the layout and the felting process.

I teach workshops too, as I mentioned earlier and also run a very small shop out of my studio. I sell my work and am starting to sell natural fibers & fabrics, including fibers & fabrics naturally dyed by me in my studio. I now have a section of my website dedicated to ‘Workshop Materials’ and hope to get some of my naturally dyed fibers up soon.