Spring is a very busy time for Heather Phillips. It’s not unusual for her to work twelve to eighteen hours a day at Heather’s Place, the little sewing shop in the lower level of her Water Hill home, making and altering dresses for proms and weddings. The handwork takes a toll, and she sleeps in wrist splints and contends with occasional shooting pain and numbness in her arms. But there’s an added warmth and excitement in her workplace during the busy season. “I really enjoy working with brides,” says Phillips, fifty-nine, “because you’re almost always dealing with happy people.”
One recent Saturday, bride Courtney Noonan and her mother, Laurie Noonan, are studying pink fabric swatches for Laurie’s mother-of-the-bride skirt. In another corner, Megan Angelini is trying on her wedding gown, which Phillips created from Angelini’s mother’s wedding dress.
“I’m so excited!” Angelini beams as she studies herself in the full-length mirror. Phillips has removed poufy Princess Diana-era sleeves and created a simple gown with spaghetti straps and a long train. “It’s the kind of dress I’d always wanted,” Angelini says. With a bridesmaid, a family friend, and her mother looking on, she then decides to reuse three fabric flowers from the sleeves to accent the back waistline–and to add tiny buttons down the back of the train. Each will be sewn on by hand.
Phillips enjoys “rescuing a garment that others thought was toast.” She’s made a dress from the 1890s wearable again and fashioned a bride’s gown out of her grandmother’s linen tablecloth. She’s also created a wedding suit modeled after Ellen DeGeneres’s; a structured jacket for a client going to a steampunk convention; and a Loch Ness monster costume. “I like the variety,” she says. “I like to work outside the box.” But despite her busy schedule, “I can always find some time to hem some pants.”
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“As a little, little girl I sewed clothes for my stuffed animals,” recalls Phillips, who was born in Detroit and grew up in the suburbs. For her seventh Christmas, her paternal grandfather gave her a Singer sewing machine, and her mother taught her to use it.
As a teenager, “I was a late bloomer, and there were a lot of clothes I couldn’t wear,” Phillips says–so she made or altered her own. She’s still amused at the memory of the junior high home economics teacher who gave her a C plus (“the lowest grade I ever got in my life!”) for the creative additions she’d make to her projects, including using an invisible zipper–a new concept at that time. She suspects that her advanced skills made the teacher feel “insecure.”
Phillips was always good at science, and in high school, she dreamed about designing space suits. When she entered the U-M in 1973 she initially took an engineering curriculum but switched after a semester, tired of the difficulties of being one of the few women enrolled. “I didn’t want to fight that fight,” she says, so she switched to the free-spirited Residential College and studied Arts and Ideas in the Humanities, with a minor in drama (she worked in the U-M’s costume shops and helped found the former Brecht Company).
Phillips met her future husband, Steve Adams, as a U-M senior. She was waiting tables at the Second Chance nightclub (now the Necto), and he was a bookseller at Borders. Adams is African American, which caused some friction–she says her paternal grandfather “basically disowned me.” But the rest of the family, including Phillips’ two younger brothers, embraced the relationship. When they married in 1984, Phillips wore a vintage dress that had a “Grace Kelly look.” (Laid off when Borders hit the skids, Adams now works in IT at the U-M Medical Center.)
In the early 1980s Phillips worked for the former Suwanee Springs Leatherworks, sewing vests, bags, jackets–even “a shredded, raw-looking Tarzan-style loincloth costume” for rocker Ted Nugent. But she says she realized “someone could make a living doing this” only when she met independent tailor Marie Krull. The two often refer work to each other, and Krull describes Phillips as “very skilled …both aesthetically and technically.”
Krull adds that Phillips “connects in a personal way” with her customers. Sometimes these connections have been poignant. Years ago, Phillips was fitting a bride when she noticed bruises on the young woman’s body. Crying, the woman confessed that her fiance was abusing her. She later called off the wedding.
Phillips is starting to meet her next generation of clients: she recently worked on a Bat Mitzvah dress for the daughter of one of her brides. But she worries that sewing is a dying art. “We’ve already lost two generations to it,” she says. “It’s been forty years since we stopped teaching it in schools.” She can’t believe that some people “just buy a new shirt if they lose a button!”
Phillips does her best to encourage those new to a thimble. She teaches sewing at WCC and has taught U-M students how to make “wearable art.”
As the afternoon winds down in Phillips’s shop, Courtney and Laurie Noonan select a crepe de chine silk for Laurie’s “swirly” tea-length skirt. Courtney already has her dress ready for her June wedding. The strapless lacy gown was purchased as a sample size 12, but Phillips says she performed “major surgery” on it to make it a size 4. “It was the least stressful part of all the wedding planning,” Courtney says of the dress. She describes Phillips’ work in one word: “Magic.”
