BANGOR, Maine — On a snowy Tuesday morning, barely past 9 a.m., Linda Cummings’ alterations shop on Hammond Street was already buzzing with activity.
Her quaint storefront, tucked around the back of an unsuspecting building, is only open two days per week for clothing drop-offs, pick-ups and fittings. Customers file in from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays to make sure they are able to get their clothes in Cummings’ hands.
Given that she doesn’t advertise, Cummings, a career seamstress, doesn’t know how her business has been consistently booming over the nearly 25 years she’s been threading the needle in Greater Bangor. But as fewer people are learning how to sew and as those who have the skills are getting older, Cummings said people are always eager to find someone who can fix their clothes for them.
“It’s a really good problem to have, and I can’t even say that it’s flattering because there are so few of us that you have to take what you can get,” Cummings laughs, as she often does. “But I try to do the best for everybody. I don’t care if it’s a $1,000 piece or a $5 piece from Goodwill.”
But Cummings should be flattered, given that most of her business has boomed by word of mouth. Through her skills and her personality, she has developed a loyal following of customers that keeps her busy. She repairs garments at her home and in her shop nearly six days per week.
“She’s just as good as they get,” Nancy Boynington of Monroe said as she was dropping off her husband’s favorite, well-worn L.L. Bean shirt so Cummings could replace its tattered collar. Boynington’s husband assumed he would have to throw the shirt, unaware Cummings was capable of clothing miracles.
When it comes to alterations and repairs, Cummings can work her magic on just about anything. From altering suits and prom gowns to replacing lost buttons and patching ripped jeans, she does it all with ease.
But if you asked Cummings in middle school whether she saw clothing repair in her future, she’d laugh and remind you that she failed home economics in eighth grade. Sitting behind a sewing machine, surrounded by multicolored bobbins of thread and a pair of pinned overalls, Cummings still cracks up over her failed adolescent sewing endeavors and where she ended up.
“I flunked the sewing part. I got a big fat ‘F,’” Cummings said. “Who cares in eighth grade? You don’t really care at that age. You’re not looking that far ahead.”
Cummings didn’t learn how to properly sew until she was 23 years old. Her sister owned an alterations business in Connecticut, where Cummings lived at the time. Her sister, Holly, needed some extra hands to keep up with the work that was coming in, so Cummings took this as her cue to learn how to sew.
While working days at a nursing home, Cummings would spend her nights teaching herself how to sew based on the time she had spent watching her sister at work.
“I learned the majority on my own,” Cummins said. “I watched [my sister] for a while, then I took [the sewing] home, and I did it. Then I gave it back to her [and] she inspected it.”
Eventually, she started getting better and faster, and within five years Cummings had her own alterations shop in Connecticut. But when gang members began seeking out her services to sew patches onto their jackets, Cummings decided it was time to move her family and her business to Maine — a place with less crime — where her father left her 10 acres of land.
Since 1993, Cummings has had alterations shops at three different locations in Greater Bangor: first in Brewer, then on Broadway and most recently her location on Hammond Street.
Despite scaling back shop hours from five days per week to two days per week, Cummings isn’t any less busy. When she is in her shop, she isn’t able to get any work done on alterations and repairs because she is busy with the flow of customers all day. Cummings does the bulk of her sewing at home, where customers have tried to drop of clothes, but she draws the line there.
“[Customers] want to come to my house. They drop clothes off to my husband at [work]. I had to nip that. I stopped going to church for a while because people were bringing me bags of clothes at church,” Cummings said.
But Cummings doesn’t want these barriers she had to set to come off as complaining. She loves her customers, so much so that she spends the overwhelming majority of her time invested in fixing the clothes they love.
People who get their clothes fixed are driven by two things, Cummings said, frugality and not wanting to let go of a piece of clothing they are really attached to. Being able to fix her own cherished items if they rip or need to be altered is something Cummings said she appreciates having the ability to do.
“I don’t think that people think about [getting items repaired] unless it’s a travesty and it’s something they really love and they’re like, ‘What can I do about this,’” Cummings said.
But as fewer children are being required to take home economics courses, and more people are willing to buy a new product instead of learning to fix something, Cummings fears the ability to sew will become a rarity. Cummings herself couldn’t even persuade her daughter to learn how to sew.
“It’s sad to say that sewing isn’t being passed down,” Cummings said. “My daughter is 30 years old and she has scoliosis, so she is always having to get her clothes altered. I tried to get her to learn to sew to fix her own [clothes]. She watched me do this her whole life — no desire. She’d pay 100 bucks to have her pants done before she’d even fix them.”
For the skill to stick, Cummings said someone has to want to learn how to sew. But given that she taught herself after a failed middle school attempt at sewing, she said sewing is a skill anyone can learn — at least on a basic level.
“People overthink it too much I think. I feel like if I taught myself, anybody can do it if they just take the time,” Cummings said.