Twenty-six years ago, Dufek was working as a registered nurse at the U-M Health System. Her job managing University Hospital’s operating and recovery rooms often sent her on icy walks between buildings. To keep warm, she stitched a full-length coat from a Pendleton blanket she had just bought–brown with red, orange, and black Native American-inspired designs woven into it. She’s since made about 380 of the exquisitely tailored, one-of-a-kind, custom-fitted coats. Now retired from nursing, she’s become a full-time coat maker. She buys Pendleton blankets at full retail price, about $250, and sells finished coats for around $550.
Pendleton Woolen Mills, founded by Thomas Kay in 1863 and still in the family, is “a very conservative company,” says Dufek. “I’m not sure I understand” why it disapproves of her work.
“I asked them once, and they said, ‘We don’t really like what you do.’ I said, ‘Why not? I’m just interested?’ They said, ‘People will think we made them.'”
She answered–and at that point, they already knew–that she bends over backwards to respect the integrity of the design, and though she never removes the Pendleton tags and gives Pendleton full credit for the blanket, she also adds her own labels to show the design and craftsmanship is her own. “But,” she concedes, “I’m not the only person doing this. Other people make Pendleton coats that look a wreck, with patch pockets that don’t even match the pattern.”
About five years ago, Mark Hodesh, then owner of Downtown Home & Garden, invited her to make a small display in his store, and he hung his own Sheri Dufek Pendleton coat in the window. That is how many customers find her, along with Facebook and word of mouth.
“I’m not bragging,” she says, “but I’m only trying to prepare people when I tell them that when they walk down the street, they are going to attract attention.” She says that when she’s out in one of her own coats, cars slow down to follow her.
She still wears her original coat, though she now has half a dozen others. Her coats are unlined, but the dense Pendleton weave and her overlapping “half-French” seams keep out the wind. The natural lanolin in the wool keeps out the rain and snow.
She keeps about thirty Pendleton blankets in her inventory: classic solids with striped borders (aka Hudson Bay blankets), colorful Southwestern motifs that Pendleton manufactured in the nineteenth century to trade with Indian tribes, and modern designs by contemporary Native American artists. Though the occasional customer will buy a coat off the rack at DTH&G, most people end up in her home workshop, looking at an array of blankets spread out on her floor.
She says Hodesh seemed to surprise himself when he chose the vivid red, black, and white Navajo “water” blanket. “It was a little outside his comfort zone,” she says. Hodesh reports he recently wore it in New York, “working our way through Upper East Side museums. One of those elegant, slim, Fifth Avenue women dripping with expensive jewelry leaned in and whispered, ‘Honey, that coat is seriously beautiful.'”
Dufek is a famous name in Ann Arbor sports history. Sheri is married to Bill Dufek, an offensive lineman for Michigan in the 1970s. His older brother Donny played defense for U-M and then for the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks (Their father, Don, also played for Michigan.) Sheri’s family also played a part in sports history–her father, Guy Reiff, played professional baseball before becoming a U-M professor of kinesiology.
Sheri and Bill have known each other since seventh grade. “We used to play Crack the Whip on the Burns Park skating rink, and I used to always hold his hand,” she says. “He was so powerful, I wanted to be holding his hand, because unless he was holding onto you when he cracked the whip, you’d go flying.”
Bill, of course, owns a coat himself, and has brought her a lot of business. “At the Notre Dame-Michigan game a few years ago, he called me and said, ‘A guy wants to buy my coat off me. What do I do?’ I said, ‘Sell it. I’ll make you another.’ He said, ‘But what do I come home in?'” He decided to keep the coat.
