(*but she loves old patterns)

Kate Mathews admired Folkwear Patterns for decades. Then, she had a chance to buy it off the auction block.

by Jess McCuan . photos by Matt Rose

Folkwear Patterns is a business based on nostalgia. Kate Mathews, its owner, has no problem admitting that. First, to be able to use a Folkwear pattern, you must know how to sew—which is, in itself, old-fashioned enough. Then, you should be interested in an outfit with a degree of authenticity—not one that’s simply inspired by a costume or dress but cut from that garment’s pattern. Let’s say, for example, that you want to create a prairie dress, the kind an American pioneer woman might have worn in the 19th century. You could do it with Folkwear pattern #201, which gives you the precise template for a long, ruffly embroidered get-up that just screams Laura Ingalls Wilder. Or perhaps you want an authentic Edwardian Bridal Gown, complete with leg o’mutton sleeves and a flouncy train. That’s Folkwear pattern #227. “So much of needlework and sewing is passed down through generations,” says Mathews, whose mother made her a Folkwear prairie dress and who made one for her own daughter, Micah. “A business manager would tell me I’m crazy to keep this business open, but I have a passionately devoted, tiny little market.”

Folkwear Patterns was founded in the 1970s by three bona fide northern California hippies. The three women—Barbara Garvey, Alexandra Jacopetti and Ann Wainwright—all living north of San Francisco, had been traveling the world and found funky clothing they wanted to duplicate. It was the ‘70s, after all, and nothing could have been cooler than adding fringe to your clothes or wearing something global or ethnic-looking, Mathews remembers. At the time, Mathews and her then-husband Rob Pulleyn were living in Albuquerque. He was a fiber artist and she ran an arty weaving and spinning supply shop, Village Wools. The first Folkwear patterns, she recalls, were for wild outfits—a flowing full-length Syrian gown, for example, or a quilted Turkish Coat. She started selling them at Village Wools, and they were a hit with the sewing crowd.

Mathews, now 60, has spent much of her life at a fascinating intersection between fashion, art and publishing. Her father was Cleve Mathews, a newspaperman and NPR’s first news director. He lived in Asheville in his later years, and when he died in January, at age 84, NPR ran a long tribute to him on its evening news show All Things Considered. Mathews says that, in the past few months, she’s received kind emails and phone calls from journalists around the country.

Though she has no formal training in it, you might argue that she had a head start in the journalism world when she and Pulleyn started Fiberarts magazine in 1974. It began as a typewritten newsletter distributed to Village Wools’ customers. The next year, they published it in tabloid form and charged a subscription fee. By the time the couple landed in Asheville in late 1978, they were able to hire writers and editors.

Meanwhile, in Asheville, the craft scene was blossoming. Mathews and Pulleyn published Fiberarts six times a year and then, in the early ‘80s, started rolling out books on various aspects of craft. Their company? Lark Books, now a downtown Asheville institution. Rob is the “R” in Lark, and Kate is the “K.” The “L” and the “A” came from the first names of partner investors. Mathews says their daughter, Micah Pulleyn, now 35, grew up around the Lark office and something must have rubbed off—she’s an Asheville book artist.

When the couple divorced in the mid-1980s, Pulleyn stayed with Lark. Mathews took freelance writing and editing work of various kinds, then a full-time job with Mission Hospital. In 1998, Pulleyn bought Folkwear Patterns, which had struggled through the 1980s as the sewing shops that carried the patterns closed.

Just one year later, a New York City company, Sterling Publishing, offered to buy all the companies in Pulleyn’s assembled “Lark universe.” Sterling has offices on Park Avenue in Manhattan and owns a number of small presses, with titles in everything from literary nonfiction to dieting and self-help.

Mathews, who had by that time come back to Lark and was managing Folkwear Patterns, watched the developments on the edge of her seat. She says she knew, when she heard about the Sterling deal, that the (mostly male) New York City publishers wouldn’t know what to do with Folkwear. They surely wouldn’t see its value. By 2002, when Sterling started takeover negotiations with Barnes & Noble and rumors were flying, Mathews knew she had to make a move. “Men cannot understand the relationship of women with what they wear,” she says. “I knew Barnes & Noble wouldn’t keep [Folkwear] around.”

She gathered up all the cash she had (and some that she didn’t) to save Folkwear. After borrowing from family, friends and the SBA, cashing in her retirement and taking a second mortgage on her home, she bought Folkwear Patterns for around $200,000. “It looked like it was impossible,” she says of the fundraising rounds among women she had known for years. “It’s always possible.”

At first, she rented space for boxes of sewing patterns in the Riverside Business Park in West Asheville. Then, in 2006, she and her current husband Bob Bowles—who organizes WNC magazine’s Wine and Food Festival, among other events—bought a two-story former firehouse in downtown Barnardsville. The 8,300-square-foot building is now Folkwear Patterns headquarters (and a space where people take weekly yoga classes or have lunch with Mathews and practice their French). She hired a local pattern tester, Elizabeth George, and assembled a small team of freelance illustrators and designers who work remotely in various cities.

Standing among her boxes in an elegant Belgian military chef’s jacket (Folkwear pattern #133), Mathews says she feels like she’s carrying on a legacy as much as she’s running a business. Now, downstairs in the firehouse, she keeps an inventory of some 70,000 paper patterns. There are around 100 Folkwear patterns still in circulation, though the network of stores that sell them is dwindling. Now, more than half of Mathews’ sales are to individual buyers online, she says. People use Folkwear patterns to make costumes for plays or Renaissance fairs or musem exhibits. Ashrams order her patterns to make Japanese kimonos. A costume designer once ordered Folkwear’s patterns to make outfits for the male actors in an episode of the TV show Lonesome Dove. One woman, to Mathews’ amusement, uses Folkwear’s sheer Victorian patterns to make outfits for a Connecticut strip club. “I have the most fabulous strange customers,” she says.

Mathews has big plans to further digitize Folkwear and eventually spin off other businesses, like a lingerie line for plus-size women. For now, though, she’s content to keep the company—and the legacy of sewing cool clothing from patterns—alive. “I brought it from wax paste-ups to digital,” she says of Folkwear. “It’s like the Energizer bunny. It keeps on cranking.”

For more info, check out www.folkwear.com.