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ADVANCE

Kathy Southern's business was getting out of hand.

Squeezed in a windowless landing between two bedrooms, her sewing machine was wedged in a built-in cabinet. She divided fabric among closets -- five boxes in one closet, four in another. Her husband, Bubba, would come home with a hundred pounds of patterns they had printed -- and up two flights of stairs they'd go.

Kathy Southern designs and sells purse patterns. From her house in Davie County and through her Web site, www.studiokatdesigns.com, she packs and mails her patterns to distributors, sewing shops and people all over the world. She has customers in all 50 states and 24 countries, and last year she sold more than 24,000 of her patterns at about $6 or $7 each.

Her nook was a pleasant enough place for a weekend seamstress. When Southern and her husband built their house and moved to Advance in 2002, she had her friend Beth Lineberry design a space in the landing area specifically for sewing. "It was not a place for a business," Southern said.

Last year, Southern hired a contractor to build a small addition to their 2,100-square-foot home. They cleverly tucked it under an existing screen porch at the back of the house, adding an unscreened section to their porch and building a studio underneath.

At 550 square feet, it's not a huge space. But it's just what Kathy Southern needs.

Large windows wrap around the sides, filling the carpeted studio with bright, natural light. There's room for Southern's cutting table, another table for her sewing machine and ironing, and a series of drawers and a countertop for her laptop, printer and a television so she can watch DVDs or listen to music as she works. Her cats, Jeter and Joba, lounge on cushions on a window seat by one door. Kathy can use the other to quickly transfer heavy boxes of pattern components to her car.

The room is heated and cooled by a small heat pump. The room slants slightly, to work with drainage, and work spaces are cleverly designed so they are level on top but angle with the slope of the floor on the bottom.

But most important, the new studio has storage. That was a priority.

There are custom-divided drawers to corral small things, like D-rings for purse handles, and zippers and magnetic snaps to keep bags closed. Southern sells purse hardware, too, so that people using her patterns can get most materials except the fabric in one place. Two large walk-in closets are stashed with mailing supplies and pattern paperwork, and there are smaller closets where she has fabric organized by color and style. And there's filing drawer after filing drawer for packaged patterns, and ample room to sew and write as she works through a new pattern, building prototypes and writing instructions. It's the kind of organization you see in a glossy, house magazine or on decorating blogs -- the kind some of us aspire to but rarely achieve.

Oh, and she has a view. Her backyard glowed with melting snow on a recent sunny afternoon. Squirrels, birds and a stray black cat moved under the arch of bare poplars and oaks. Splashed across the studio's long windows, the scene looked like a landscape painting come to life.

"I wanted a place where I could be inspired by color," she said.

In 2005, at 51, she retired from her job as a city chemist with Winston-Salem's waste-water-treatment lab. She was looking for something to do, some kind of cottage industry to start. "I couldn't imagine sitting around, watching the Price is Right," she said.

She could sew and she loved purses -- she has a closet full of them -- and handbags don't come with the same fitting issues that other garments do.

At first, she thought she would just sell bags. She quickly discovered that was a lot of work for little money -- it takes her about 8 hours to make a bag from one of her patterns, and though she tried selling them on her Web site, she was only making about $2 or $3 an hour profit.

But her mother had taught her how to sew, and her grandmother made a living sewing, and though Southern had never made a pattern, she knew what went into creating one. She researched what other people were selling online and decided that purse patterns would be a good niche. Since her shop would be online, she didn't need a lot of capital or space to rent.

Today, Southern sells 21 different patterns, including ones for fabric inserts that go inside purses, creating spaces to stash cell phones, iPods, wallets, checkbooks, pens, lip gloss and the dozens of other flotsam and jetsam that inhabit women's bags.

Their growing family was also a big part of their motivation for renovation. Their daughter, Erica, who lives in Raleigh, is pregnant and due in April. Southern knew that Erica wouldn't come visit with her studio scattered among the two spare bedrooms.

Southern knew what kind of work area would work best, but she needed some help. She again recruited Lineberry, who turned Southern's ideas into a design.

Lineberry has sewn, too, and Southern thinks that helped.

"That's a very technical room, when you think about it. Every drawer is designed for a purpose. She made sure those cabinets and those spaces were designed to fit what she needed to put in there," Lineberry said. "She measured exactly how large her patterns were."

The addition and renovation cost about $55,000. The work started last summer and Southern moved into her new space at the beginning of the year.

To pay for it, Southern used her profits and borrowed $15,000 in home equity. It was a little scary, but she doesn't regret it. "It's very hard to say, it's time to spend this amount of money," Southern said. "It's just great to have everything in one spot. I can stay focused, come up for lunch, and it's almost like having a stand-alone business some place."

"I wish my grandmother could see this," she said as she stood in the light-filled room, "because she of anyone would be most pleased."

lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com
727-7302

If you have a house story you'd like to share, contact Journal reporter Laura Giovanelli.