Services by
M.G. Woodward
represents the collected skills of a diverse career in the garment industry, spanning from costume design to factory stitching.
What started as a family tradition, M.G. applies over 12 years of industry-tested experience to every project. Keep reading to learn about an obsession with style that turned into a career in making and mending clothes that really fit.
It’s in the family
Like many others, I first learned to sew from my mother. I was preparing to enter 6th grade as a pre-teen. I wanted to personalize a jean jacket: a sturdy, standard jacket from a big-box store. I wanted to express something through that jacket, something specific about myself, of which I had recently become quite proud. I wanted my peers to know that my Grandmother (my mother’s mother) had style. Real style, the kind you can’t buy, the sort you have to build yourself. I didn’t get to learn that from her directly, because sadly she developed M.S. in her forties, and by the time I was born in 1989, she could no longer dress herself. She died when I was 9 years old, shortly before I graduated from Elementary school.
At her funeral service, I heard so many people describe this incredible woman who treated every aspect of her life like an artistic practice, and created beauty in everything she did. I was suddenly sad for the loss of her for the first time, because I had only known her in illness, muted and immobilized.
After her passing, I was allowed to explore the private spaces of her home, like her closet, her jewelry box, and the room she kept for her enormous loom, in which she had woven sunset-colored textiles while she was still able.
In college at Cornell, she majored in Home Economics, which at the time was the most appropriate course of study for a women of marriageable age. The courses she chose included fine arts, pattern-making, and fashion illustration. Her collected artifacts of fashion were like a museum to me; a catalog of the works and materials of a master artist.
And I wanted everyone to know that I knew I was special, because clearly she was special.
So I cut and composed patches of her fabrics—maybe seven different patterns—and four of her giant abalone buttons. I asked my mom to show me how to pin the patches and zigzag around the edges in a contrasting thread.
I learned just how difficult it is to sew over a felled seam in denim on a domestic machine, and so changed my design to fit inside of them. I learned that cutting off a sleeve is way easier than removing the stitching at the shoulder. And I wore that denim vest everywhere.
I still wear it everywhere, at the ripe old age of 35. Honestly, it goes with everything, and it helps me remember that I carry her with me. Plus, you can bet that every time I get a compliment on it, I take the opportunity to tell her story. I wasn’t able to learn her lessons, but I did inherit her tools, and through them I have learned her values.
