The funny thing about Chelle Summer is that it didn’t come from just anywhere.
When one looks at so many brands, there doesn’t always seem to be a story behind what’s created and the continued creative process. Mostly, it’s people who wake up one day and want to make things.
There is much more depth to my story because it goes back to my childhood, the one with my sister Denise who died by suicide nearly 31 years ago. We never had a chance to experience an adult sibling relationship because she died just two weeks from her eighteenth birthday, when I was 21.
Instead, I spent many of the past 30 years speaking about suicide, about loss specifically about suicide loss, about how to move forward, about how to prevention suicide, about how to find hope after the trauma and devastation of suicide.
But in that time, I also continued to create as she and I had in our childhood. When we were young, Mom set us loose with sewing scraps and her mother’s Singer sewing machine making Barbie clothes. After Denise died, thanks to a neighbor across the street, I ventured into quilt making and mostly home decor.
Life got busy with other things and the weekends for sewing became fewer and farther between. At one time I came close to giving away Mom’s Bernina sewing machine that she had given me. I really didn’t think I would sew again.
I know, the joke was on me, right?
I had no idea that when I began to make bucket bags and created Chelle Summer, first collecting vintage dresses from estate sales, and then thinking that would never work, that it was going to be too difficult to get enough vintage clothes together to do that (another joke on me!), I would end up where I’m at.
While I use a mix of vintage and new materials, there are stories to tell in each item I make. It might be a bedspread from an estate sale or a piece of wallpaper I found stored in a garage. Or my favorite– the underside of vintage patio umbrella that no longer works. Items have passed through my hands because I wasn’t sure how to use them at the time.
Each item tells a story and it’s about the story I continue to tell, the story that was inspired by the childhood Denise and I shared, the adult life she didn’t experience. That story is what fuels Chelle Summer.
That story gives everything I make more meaning and love. And hope.