Keeping it Local with Fruitful Sewing

Kathleen Funderburk is the coordinator of Fruitful Sewing. She started the program six years ago with the hopes of bringing women together to learn and develop the skills of a stitcher. 

Their first contract was for Tree Street Youth. The Fruitful Sewing ladies had already been making masks for The Root Cellar’s  Super Summer Day Camp kids as well as offering free masks to neighborhood residents, and Tree Street needed some for their kids as well. So, fruitful sewing made 100 masks just for them. This was the first paid opportunity for the women of Fruitful Sewing.

Rogue Wear is a local business that offers screen printing (including those awesome Love Your Neighbor shirts that you see our Root Cellar team wearing), embroidery, and manufacture a wide array of bags. They had recently acquired a contract to make masks for Bates College. Mark Rodrigue, the Owner of Rogue Wear, connected with us to outsource the project, creating a new income opportunity for the ladies of Fruitful Sewing.

This provided an incredible opportunity for local neighbors to partner with a local business to create 2700 hundred masks for a local college. 

To support the ongoing work of Fruitful Sewing, click here.

“This was something I had been praying for for about two years - how to teach them the business of what they’re doing. You can make money, you just have to figure out how to get in and do it”, Kathleen says. This contract opened the exact door for which she had been praying.  

“There are opportunities in Maine for stitchers. The way to make the most money is to be a self-contractor and find a niche. I have been working to try and come up with some sort of way to teach this business side of skill that the ladies in Fruitful Sewing love and have become really good at.” 

- Kathleen Funderburk, Fruitful Sewing Coordinator

When joining the Fruitful Sewing group, the first project everyone makes is a basic bag that gets The Root Cellar graphic put on it. This bag helps with brand awareness for The Root Cellar and selling of the bags helps support the program. 

“The machines get beat to death,” Kathleen jokingly says. Having money from the bags, and donations from supporters, helps with things like repairing the machines and buying supplies. 

Once members of the program develop their skills enough (taking anywhere between one to two years), they graduate and can teach the beginners’ class. Once they teach a class for a semester, they are awarded their own sewing machine. The women who are working on the contract for Rogue Wear have all accomplished this.

“Everyone is in community together—from different languages, different cultures, different religions. And that’s a really beautiful thing to see...this community loving each other.”