Garment technicians rarely get interviewed.

But buyers, designers, textile experts? Everyone talks about them. But the person who actually decides whether a garment fits, closes properly, and survives being worn? Almost invisible.

In this episode, I sit down with my friend and fellow industry veteran Debbie, a garment technician who’s spent her career being the bridge between a designer’s sketch and the customer trying it on in a change room. We get into what a tech pack actually is, why a 0.3cm measurement can cause a genuine crisis, and the emotional cost of watching manufacturing relationships get shifted offshore chasing cheaper margins.

We also talk honestly about the parts of the industry nobody glamorises: sizing and grading gaps for larger bodies, the blame that lands on garment techs when something goes wrong in store, and why working retail first is still the best advice either of us can give anyone wanting into fashion.

It’s a conversation about the unsexy, unseen decisions that decide whether a piece of clothing actually works and why that work deserves more credit than it gets.

It’s the final episode of The First Makers series.
In this episode we speak about the Polynesian goddess Hina and how she is seen across many different islands and known by many different names, but her message is the same.
We also touch on the important of the possum cloak in the culture of Indigenous Australians and how that knowledge was almost lost but is fortunately alive and thriving today.

Cover image is of Mildred Taniova colouring in the tapa designs with red pigment. Arara village, Collingwood Bay, Oro Province PNG, 2001. Photograph by A. Hermkens.

Before there was a world, there was a thread.

In this episode of First Makers, I’m looking at two very different models of the same idea. Divinity and thread as the origin of everything that matters. First, Mama Ocllo, sent by the Inca sun god Inti to teach the first women to spin and weave. She is a culture-hero, not a weaver herself, whose myth explains where an entire craft tradition came from. Then Spider Grandmother, who in Navajo and Hopi tradition isn’t a teacher at all, but the maker of the world itself. She spun existence out of clay and attached every living thing to her by a single thread of her own silk.

Part of The Goddess Project, my ongoing series on ancient goddesses, the history of draped cloth, and why what women make has always mattered more than it’s been given credit for.

Cover art by Susan Seddon Boulet