Artistic surroundings — Julie Scheurich, left, and Nancy Gear stand on the entry porch of a newly renovated house that is the home of Fabrications, a new fabric and yarn shop, fiber-arts gallery and studio in Downtown DeLand.
BEACON PHOTOS/JOE CREWS
Crafty ladies — Julie Scheurich, left, and Nancy Gear are the brains behind Fabrications, a new fabric and yarn shop, fiber-arts gallery and studio in Downtown DeLand.
Nancy Gear and Julie Scheurich often toiled at jobs that only occasionally required much creativity. But making original creations of cloth and yarn was never far from their minds.
“I’ve always been a sewist — that’s the current term — and I learned from my mother,” Scheurich said. “I went to art school and had jobs in writing and photography, but I was a legal assistant for too long, and I wanted to get back into artistic endeavors.”
Gear, too, had a number of art classes before becoming a librarian for about a dozen years, then deciding she missed working with fabrics.
“One of my favorite parts [of being a librarian] was making puppets, so this kind of goes with that,” Gear said.
So the two women eventually decided to pool their talents to give an outlet to their creativity and the creativity of others.
The result is Fabrications, a new fabric and yarn shop, fiber-arts gallery and studio that occupies a renovated 128-year-old historic building at the northeast corner of West Wisconsin and North Florida avenues in Downtown DeLand.
Fabrications will open Tuesday, June 13.
At Fabrications, Gear and Scheurich say they will sell an assortment of fabrics by the yard, skeins of yarn in virtually any conceivable color, patterns, notions and items handmade by local artists and craftspeople.
But they will also offer arts and crafts classes one evening a week, with instructors teaching different topics on a regularly changing basis. They’ll have a sewing studio where customers may work on their own projects. And they’ll host what they call “playshops” for beginners and experienced artisans in sewing, knitting and crochet, surface design and a wide variety of textile arts and crafts.
Another evening each week will be set aside for “sit-and-stitch” sessions, where people can gather to work on their own projects.
“Besides helping customers, we can spend time creating our own works,” Scheurich said. “It’s much happier than a law office.”
It’s also prettier. Fabrications is located in a blue-and-cream, metal-roofed Italianate structure that has been renovated from top to bottom by Gear’s husband, Tony Spaziani, a building contractor and owner of Seldom Seen Construction who has renovated many of the historic buildings in DeLand, Gear said.
After the shop’s opening on June 13, Scheurich and Gear will host a reception for their first featured artist, silk painter Sherrill Schoening of Tropical Silks, from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, June 16.
Fabrications will be open 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Friday, and noon-5 p.m. Saturday.
Fabrications’ website, http://fabrications.rocks, is still under construction, but its Facebook page is up at Facebook.com/Fabrication - DeLand FL. For more information, call 386-624-7340 or stop by 145 W. Wisconsin Ave.
- Joe Crews, joe@beacononlinenews.com