Jennie Chancey

I grew up as one of three siblings in a homeschooling family, traveling with my aviation historian and pilot father and my incredibly creative teacher mother. We visited almost all fifty states, Canada, Mexico, England, Germany, and South Africa before I was 16 years old. For me, it was normal to spend summers at vintage air shows, flying in “Warbirds” like the T-6 Texan and B-25 Mitchell bomber. My parents often dressed in authentic WW2 uniforms to match the planes Dad flew, and we children all fell in love with the history of the time. My glamorous grandmother also inspired me with her impeccable taste, and I spent hours flipping through her scrapbooks, agog at how beautifully she always dressed. It was inevitable that I’d eventually fall hard for 1940s and 1950s fashions! Because my mother made a lot of my clothes, I became interested in sewing at age five and first tried to stitch an outfit for a favorite doll on Mom’s machine while the material was wrapped around the poor thing’s torso.

Mom began to formally teach me to sew around age eight, but a few disastrous episodes of sleeves sewn into the wrong armholes and long sessions with my seam ripper caused me to throw in the towel for a few years.

The mid-1990s were banner years for Jane Austen film adaptations, and I just fell in love with the gowns and accessories. I made a whole bunch of dresses inspired by films and historical fashion plates and wore them constantly. Ladies kept asking me where I found my outfits, then wondered if I’d make them to sell. It sounded like a good idea to me, so I stitched up a few sample outfits for models and had a friend take pictures for me. My husband told me he thought the designs were sensible and beautiful and said I should christen my sewing business “Sense & Sensibility Clothing.”

Many customers asked me to sell copies of the patterns I created to make their outfits. At first I wasn’t sure about drafting patterns for a wide range of “standard” sizes, but I finally took the plunge in 1998, publishing my Regency Gown Pattern. The immediate success of that pattern convinced me that there was a