People often ask me how I got into sewing, when I started. Where I trained. And I always find myself pausing before I answer — because the honest answer doesn’t start with me. It starts with my mother, before I was born.
“There’s something almost poetic about the way sewing found you long before you ever touched a machine yourself.”
My mum always says she can barely thread a needle. Sewing was never her thing, never a skill she carried through life or passed down in the traditional sense. But when she was pregnant with me, something changed.
While waiting for my arrival, she suddenly began sewing everything she could think of — blankets, teddy bears, curtains, little handmade pieces stitched together with love and anticipation. Almost as if motherhood awakened something temporary and purposeful in her hands.
And then, after I was born, the skill disappeared just as quickly as it came.
Years later, when I asked for my very first sewing machine, she didn’t hesitate. To anyone else it may have seemed random — a child wanting to sew — but to her, it felt familiar. It felt like something already written long before either of us understood it. She always believed those months of creating while carrying me meant something.
That sewing had arrived through her, only to settle permanently in me.
“It never truly felt accidental. It felt inherited in a strange and beautiful way — not through lessons or generations of tailoring, but through a fleeting moment where my mother carried both me and the beginning of my craft at the same time.”
So when I began designing, stitching, and building what would eventually become Young World by Ruth, it never truly felt accidental. It felt inherited in a strange and beautiful way, not through lessons or generations of tailoring, but through a fleeting moment where my mother carried both me and the beginning of my craft at the same time.
Maybe that’s why creating with my hands has always felt less like learning a skill and more like returning to something I was always meant to do.
Perhaps that’s why, when I name a piece after my mother — when I sit down to sew the Cecille or the Cecillia — it feels less like a tribute and more like a conversation. A continuation of something she started without knowing it, in the months before I arrived.
Every piece that leaves this studio carries that with it; not just the craft, but the origin of it. The inheritance that came without instruction, passed through love and anticipation and the strange grace of becoming a mother.
That is where Young World by Ruth truly began.
— Ruth
