All sewed up Andee Penner has a line of self-designed wares ranging from snarky greeting cards to Manitoba-centric onesies and dish towels By: David Sanderson Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, May. 10, 2019

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/05/2019 (2014 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With Mother’s Day practically upon us, Andee Penner would like to take this opportunity to give credit where credit is due.

Penner, the brains behind Sew Dandee, a Winnipeg biz specializing in greeting cards and hand-sewn products made with “love and a pinch of sarcasm,” doesn’t hesitate when asked where she gets her salty sense of humour from, particularly in regards to her Mother’s Day cards, two of which read, “Mom, thanks for not leaving me in a box on someone’s doorstep,” and “Mom, thanks for letting me live in your womb for 9 months and your house for 20 or so years.”

“I get that from my mom; she’s a big, ol’ smart ass, for sure,” Penner says, seated on a couch in the living room of her neat-as-a-pin St. Vital home, which she shares with Mac, her long-time partner and inspiration for her card, “I can’t believe I’m not sick of you yet,” and their two “senior-age” felines, Kate-O and Goose, who get their own shout-out on an item reading, “You have cat to be kitten me right meow.”

Truth be told, Penner, who also markets silk-screen print tea towels and handkerchiefs (we’ll take the one labelled, “All the snots,” please), inherited more than her mother’s dry wit. Although Pam Cayer never sat her daughter down to formally teach her how to sew, Penner learned her way around a needle and thread “through osmosis… by just being in the same room as her,” she says.

“Not only is she a highly skilled seamstress, my mother is also very MacGyver-esque in that she can figure pretty much anything out, using her own common sense. So yeah, that’s definitely where my crafty side comes from.”

Generally when we profile Winnipeggers running a home-based business, they inform us their ultimate goal is to have a store of their own, one day. That’s what makes Penner’s career arc somewhat unique: 2019 marks five years since she shuttered her Osborne Village boutique Sew Dandee, a move she maintains is the best thing she ever did, financially-speaking.

“Back then, lots of people came up to me, saying they were so sad to hear about the store closing but I was like, hey, I`m OK with it,” says Penner, now a fixture online as well as at Winnipeg pop-up markets such as this weekend’s Farm Fresh Food Hub Mother’s Day sale at Lord Roberts Community Centre (Sunday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.). “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from a friend who said don’t look at (the closure) as a failure, look at it as a great, eight-year run. That kind of flipped my view of things, and made me think of it as an evolution as opposed to an end.”

Penner, 43, moved to Winnipeg from Brandon, her hometown, when she was 19. Bored by their dead-end jobs at a telemarketing firm, she and her boyfriend at the time preferred spending their afternoons hanging out under the Osborne Street Bridge “drinking OE” (we think she means Olde English 800, a brand of malt liquor marketed by the Miller Brewing Company) and braiding hemp twine into macrame jewelry.

“I remember crashing the Osborne Village Street Festival — the Canada Day one — that summer. I plunked a blanket down near the Gas Station Theatre, where I offered to do hemp hair wraps for passers-by,” she says, hoping the statute of limitations on laws covering unlicensed street vendors has long since passed. “At the end of the day I had made in the neighborhood of $200, which absolutely blew my mind. I thought, oh my god, I can actually pay my rent.”

Penner continued crafting jewelry and whatnot in her spare time. She was rewarded in the early 2000s when Kustom Kulture, an alternative shop on River Avenue began carrying her pipe bags on a consignment basis. Soon, another store, also on River, expressed an interest in her handiwork, too, and that’s where the Sew Dandee yarn began, in earnest.

About six months after being granted retail space at Stulka, the owner there offered Penner a job managing her store. Eighteen months later, by which time Stulka had relocated to 105 Osborne St. in the heart of the Village, Penner bought her boss out, changing the name above the door to Sew Dandee in the process.

“She was a designer, too, and the main reason she wanted to sell was to concentrate all her efforts on her clothing and bags,” Penner explains. “The plan was I would continue to sell her stuff alongside my own things. Except then she changed her mind and took everything with her, leaving 1,000 square feet of space suddenly looking very, very bare.”

At the time Penner was completely stressed out, wondering how she was going to make ends meet with three-quarters of her stock having disappeared. Rather than sit around and mope, however, she got busy expanding her own line of goods to include locally-themed apparel, totes and whatever else she could conjure up on her sewing machine.

“My Manitoba stuff kind of came out of necessity,” she says, referring to dish towels featuring the image of a certain Métis leader that read “The Riel Deal,” and baby onesies emblazoned with the provincial outline, local vernacular such as Slurpees, Sal’s and Jeanne’s Bakery printed upon them. “A couple friends of mine came up with the original Manitoba stuff I was selling. Theirs’ was a big hit but because they were both super busy with school and work, they weren’t able to supply me regularly. So I quickly needed to develop something that was comparable.”

Ironically, Penner made the decision to close her store in 2014 shortly after signing a new, five-year lease. A neighbouring business owner had expressed interest in the space, so she agreed to sublet.

“It wasn’t a case of ‘oh my god, I’m broke, I have to close,’” she says, stressing because she’s always been frugally-minded, she never would have let things get to that point. No, it was more a case of opportunity knocking, she maintains.

“The funny thing is, the very next day after closing the store, I took part in an Etsy Canada market in St. Boniface, where I made more in a single day than I ever did at the store. Heading home that night, I felt like that was the universe trying to tell me something.”

Penner, whose work can be found at Silver Lotus (111 Osborne St.), Generation Green (433 Main St.) and Tara Davis Boutique (246 McDermot Ave.), says she spent much of the past year “upping her game.” Since she has always adopted an “environmental, waste-less approach” in regards to her personal life, she felt it was high time she seriously started exploring what she calls “the reusable aspect of things” in regards to her livelihood, too.

Nowadays, all her cloth items are produced out of upcyclyed material or organic fabric sourced from companies in Ontario and British Columbia. Additionally, her greeting cards are made with recycled paper, while the sleeves they arrive in are plant-based and fully biodegradable. (Did we mention her baby congrats card, the one that goes, “I’ve heard it’s like squeezing a watermelon through a hole the size of a lemon! Good luck with that!?” Or her engagement card marked “Congrats, you two! Will there be an open bar?”)

“It’s hard to want to educate without preaching,” she says, noting if you’re ever walking out of a grocery store with your arms full because you refused the offer of a plastic bag, she’ll be the one high-fiving you in the parking lot. “For that reason, at my last market I put out a tray of reusable cloth tote bags, all made with thrift store fabric, with a sign on it that said ‘pay what you can.’ The last thing I want to do is have people not make these habit changes because it’s unaffordable. If you’re ready to make that change — to forgo plastic bags, etc. — I’m willing to help you facilitate that as much as I can. That’s what Sew Dandee is primarily about, now.”

Finally, Penner, who recently began supplying Pennyloaf Bakery and Eadha Bread with branded cloth bags for their customers to use and reuse, has an idea for a snarky card she could hand out to those people who spot her at pop-up sales or farmer’s markets and remark, “Nice running into you; do you still have your store in the Village?”

“Every time that happens I smile and say no, this is what I do now. But in my head I’m like, ‘Uh, part of the reason I still don’t have my store is because you don’t know it’s been closed for five years. But have a great day!’”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca