When the late French fash­ion de­sign­er and busi­ness­woman Co­co Chanel said “I wasn’t born with pow­er – I stitched it by hand, one thread at a time,” she may as well have been re­fer­ring to Siparia seam­stress, Abena Med­i­na.

Med­i­na, the own­er of Abena The Sewing Fac­to­ry, is in­tent on build­ing a lit­er­al fac­to­ry in her com­mu­ni­ty, and told Busi­ness Guardian, “I am not go­ing to stop un­til I get it.”

She en­vi­sions a place where peo­ple can get cus­tom-made cloth­ing, al­ter­ations done, as well as the op­tion of learn­ing to sew. Med­i­na cur­rent­ly teach­es sewing and does a bit of cus­tom-made clothes on a small scale, but she is com­mit­ted to pre­vent­ing the art of sewing from dy­ing on her watch.

“Sewing is some­thing that is not as com­mon as it used to be years ago, with all the ready-to-wear op­tions on the mar­ket. I re­al­ly do en­joy im­part­ing the knowl­edge of sewing to oth­ers, and be­ing able to cre­ate em­ploy­ment for oth­er peo­ple as well is some­thing that would give me a very big sense of ful­fil­ment.”

Eight year ago, the 30-year-old had dif­fi­cul­ty se­cur­ing a job, and de­cid­ed to take a chance on some­thing she al­ready knew how to do. Her in­vest­ment? A sewing ma­chine, time, and a skill hand­ed down to her by her moth­er.

“Since I start­ed the feed­back has been tremen­dous. I had a lot of peo­ple who need­ed stuff al­tered and who want­ed spe­cif­ic gar­ments made and they start­ed reach­ing out when I start­ed to put my­self out there. I re­alised it’s ac­tu­al­ly a sus­tain­able way I could main­tain my­self and have a source of in­come.”

In ad­di­tion to re­fer­rals, she start­ed ad­ver­tis­ing on so­cial me­dia to widen her reach: Face­book, In­sta­gram, and most re­cent­ly Tik­Tok.

“There were a lot of peo­ple who didn’t know that I did this. So now that they know, they come to me to get their stuff done.”

Med­i­na said when she was about ten, she start­ed sewing clothes for her dolls. Even­tu­al­ly, her moth­er start­ed teach­ing her the cor­rect way to make clothes for peo­ple.

“She taught me the process of pat­terns, how you ap­ply the pat­terns to the fab­ric and you add the lit­tle darts for shap­ing. And I just de­cid­ed that the I want­ed a dress for my­self.”

She ex­per­i­ment­ed and when she got good at it, her moth­er taught her how to do more in­tri­cate things.

“I just kept at it be­cause I didn’t re­al­ly have sib­lings to play with.”

Through­out her Fyz­abad An­gli­can Sec­ondary school life, she was the go-to per­son for sewing.

“I was al­ways a very cre­ative per­son, and those who knew me from school, when I ac­tu­al­ly start­ed the busi­ness, they reached out and they de­cid­ed to give me a try and a lot of them still are my cus­tomers now.”

Just as her moth­er taught her, Med­i­na is com­mit­ted to giv­ing her stu­dents a sol­id foun­da­tion be­fore she moves on to any­thing more ad­vanced.

“I try to make it as sim­pli­fied as I can. I de­signed the class­es in a way that I would have want­ed when I was start­ing off. Sewing has so many dif­fer­ent as­pects to it, and I want my stu­dents to re­mem­ber the process.”

Her in-per­son cours­es are four weeks long, one day a week, with each ses­sion run­ning for about three hours. But she said she has been get­ting a lot of in­ter­est from peo­ple, most­ly along the East-West Cor­ri­dor.

“So I am in the process of cre­at­ing an on­line ver­sion of the course, which I am hop­ing to launch for the Ju­ly-Au­gust va­ca­tion.”

She still finds time to do main­ly for­mal cus­tom pieces, al­though she doesn’t take on too much of it.

“Mak­ing some­thing from scratch is not cheap, and I think peo­ple would rather pay mon­ey to make some­thing to go to a wed­ding, grad­u­a­tion, sim­ple wed­ding dress­es with min­i­mal bead­ing, or some­thing for like a birth­day out­fit as op­posed to just an every­day out­fit.”

And she al­so has a ded­i­cat­ed cus­tomer in the An­gli­can priest in Siparia, whose clothes she sews.

“And right now I al­so have some grad­u­a­tion sash­es to do.”

She said she is learn­ing, by tri­al and er­ror, how to run The Sewing Fac­to­ry ef­fi­cient­ly, and is in the process of re­struc­tur­ing how she does things.

“I was do­ing every­thing kind of hel­ter-skel­ter. I am a lit­tle bit more se­lec­tive on what I ac­tu­al­ly take on, and I try to book the time well so that I can ac­tu­al­ly have a life.”

She un­der­stands that a full-fledge fac­to­ry will take time and ded­i­ca­tion, and learn­ing to be pa­tient, all the while keep­ing the big pic­ture in view.

“And so far, I must say, things are falling in­to place. Of course, you know, it has been a strug­gle when you’re try­ing to grow some­thing from scratch, and go­ing from ab­solute­ly hav­ing no idea to what I’m do­ing to now hav­ing this clear pic­ture. But I’ll get there.”