Sewing workroom offers bun comfort

Nearly 30 years after she became a seamstress and five after she moved to the Cape Region, seamstress Donna Schiele makes her own hours, and rules. No three-day weekends for this workhorse, though.

Setting her own hours means Shiele can typically be found in her work room in the Rehoboth Beach Service Center seven days a week, with her VHS movies playing and window treatments in the works.

"I take a day off when I can't look at drapes anymore," she said. "That's the nice thing about having your own business."

When she lived in Bucks County, Pa., Schiele said she mainly worked in sewing workrooms, creating window treatments and upholstering furniture for some of the big hotels in Philadelphia and New York City.

"I worked for workrooms most of my life, but when I came here, I decided to start my own," she said. "I don't care what I sew, I just sew."

With that said, Schiele specializes in window treatments, and upholstery for furniture and boats. She’s not a tailor, she said, but typically can help clients who need alterations in their clothing by contacting some of her business associates.

“I’m not a tailor, but I have a tailor I work with and typically if somebody brings something in, I can have it back to them in two weeks,” she said. “I had a whole pontoon boat in the store over the winter. I don’t use patterns, I’ll make my own patterns as I go. I like the challenge.”

Often, Shiele said she works with decorators to create window treatments. However, she also has many everyday clients who pick out their own fabrics and come to Cushy Tushy for a window treatment or to re-upholster a sofa or chair, an inexpensive alternative to buying new or hiring a decorator.

“I’m not a decorator, I’m a work room. If people want to do a little legwork they bring me the fabric and I make whatever they want. I help them make it into what they want,” she said.

Schiele said her favorite aspect of the job is the creativity she uses to piece together the assorted fabrics she is brought by her clients, but the challenge keeps her engaged.

“Sometimes the things that look the simplest are actually the most difficult,” she said.

When Shiele isn’t working on a re-upholstery job or putting together a window treatment, she sometimes fills her time making simple items like throw pillows and even sold some colorful pillows with Rehoboth Beach embroidered on them at local stores for a while. Now, however, the majority of her work is commissioned, so she doesn’t have to spend so much time marketing the pillows and checking on inventories of her various vendors.

One of the favorite jobs of her career, she said, was one of the first jobs she did after she opened her workroom five years ago.

A woman came in with a pile of old shirts and said her husband had recently passed away, Schiele remembered. Christmas was approaching and the woman asked Schiele to take the flannels to make pillows for her children.

“I like to work for people off the street,” she said. “She brought in all these flannel shirts to make pillows for her kids and they were clean shirts and well, they still smelled like someone had worn them, her husband. That was my favorite job.”

Cushy Tushy LLC is located in the Rehoboth Beach Service Center. For more information, call the workroom at 302-604-1063 or contact Donna Schiele at donnasch2@yahoo.com.