So today is the day

So today is the day: I'm going online with my newly founded shop! I am terribly excited and sincerely hope that I can bring joy and cosiness into the homes of many of you.

Even as a small child, I was fascinated by different fabrics - I liked to feel them with my fingertips - but I had to do it secretly, otherwise I would get something for it "you look with your eyes, not with your hands", I was told when I was caught out. However, there were hardly any opportunities for this. But my mum had beautiful, fine, snow-white sheets in the linen cupboard that felt so smooth and cool on the skin. I loved playing with them, wrapping myself up in them, making tents and later, when I had my first ideas of pretty clothes, one or two of them disappeared and were transformed into mini skirts or shirts. I couldn't make anything other than these simple garments because I didn't know anything about patterns. But I didn't mind that my own creations didn't fit at all - it was the making that was interesting to me, not the result.

In my first year at the cantonal school in Chur, we made pyjamas in needlework class and were sent to a fabric shop to buy the necessary fabric. I had never seen anything like it! There were heaps of the most marvellous fabrics lying around temptingly, and nobody tapped you on the fingers when you touched them! On the contrary, the shop assistant even asked me to take the fabric between my fingers and feel its "grip". I was in paradise...

At Casa Florentini, a girls' home where I lived during my school days in Chur, there was a sewing machine on the second floor that you were allowed to use. So I bought fabric with every franc I could spare and sewed according to Burda or Neue Mode patterns. It was quite difficult at first, because it's not for nothing that you have to complete a three-year apprenticeship to qualify as a seamstress. However, I usually managed the tricky things like piped pockets, zips or collars with the help of the instructions that came with the patterns and they looked as they should, even if they were sometimes crooked and distorted. It's like everywhere else: practice makes perfect, and as I had a lot of fun, I practised whenever I could. The projects became more challenging and my self-confidence grew with every finished piece.

I bought my first sewing machine when I was twenty. The overlock stitch was important to me so that I could also work with stretchy fabrics.

Strange really: although I had been interested in fabrics and their processing since early childhood, it never occurred to me to orientate myself professionally in this direction. Not even in Basel, at the School of Design, did it occur to me to attend a fashion or textiles class. It wasn't until much later, when I discovered my new sewing machine, a Bernina Quilters Edition, and how to make quilts, that I took heart and attended "Pia's Quilting School" at the Bernina Creative Centre in Steckborn on Lake Constance. Two hours into the course, as I sat at my sewing machine among like-minded people, I felt for the first time in my life: I have arrived, this is my world... Once you have felt this, you go step by step in this direction, nothing can hold you back, and more and more your true calling crystallises....