A Pattern Drafter's Hidden Expertise and What Finally Made It Visible: An Interview with Saremy Duffy
You have gathered decades of knowledge. You've quietly accumulated expertise. You know the edges, the shortcuts, the methods that actually work. You've taught it, explained it, watched other people get better because of it. You've proven yourself in concrete ways — work you've done, people you've helped, problems you've solved.
And somehow, the world still doesn't know.
This is what Saremy Duffy described in the latest episode of the Hey Tori Podcast. Saremy Duffy is a fashion designer from FIDM (1991). A veteran of the garment industry. Someone who spent eleven years running her own accessory line called Chicken Boots, managing factories, overseeing thousands of units shipped annually. She is an eight-year YouTube veteran in the home sewing space. A professional pattern drafter and someone who understands the geometry of fabric and bodies in a way that most people never will.
And yet she shared: "I felt like I was constantly trying to sell myself."
She kept showing up, she kept teaching, and even built and shaped communities on five different platforms: YouTube, Instagram, her own community, contract work for pattern companies, and customer support for Sew Liberated. But invisible credentials don't feel like credentials until she made her expertise tangible and wrote a book.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
How a pattern expert spent months realizing she was writing a 480-page book without telling anyone
What the actual writing process looked like (and why it was lonely)
How publishing changed her — not her business, but her
What support actually looks like when you're crossing the finish line
Do You Have a Book in You? Join our free Webinar Sept 24th 2026 and see what kind of book you could write!
How an Expert Becomes a Secret
Saremy's background is not straightforward. Like many in our crafting industry, she did not pick just one thing and do it. She attended fashion design school in LA and spent years in the garment industry working with manufacturers, moved into outerwear (which she liked better), then started her own freelance business. Then she had her own business called Chicken Boots — an accessory line for knitters and crocheters that she designed, produced, and sold for eleven years. She was managing factories, overseeing the production of seven to ten thousand items a year in-house. Then a natural disaster forced her to close.
She'd been live streaming on the side for fun — discovered it through gaming, loved it, and wanted to help people understand production sewing and domestic manufacturing. But that wasn't who showed up. Instead, she found the home sewing world. "When I closed my business, there was just like a sudden vacuum of time," she said. "I just suddenly was like, what am I gonna do?"
So she kept streaming.
And eight years later, she's still doing five different things. YouTube teaching (eight years in, just had her anniversary). Instagram. How-to videos for pattern companies. Part-time contract work with Sew Liberated handling customer support, forums, course questions — anything sewing-related. And her own community.
She's excellent at all of it. None of it alone felt like enough proof.
"I think anyone trying to make a living in today's world is doing a lot of gig work," Saremy said. "And just trying to find that path of least resistance to what people need. I'm someone who really likes to be useful."
She liked being useful. She liked being behind the scenes. "We're usually trying to make the designer look like a genius. We don't really care we get that kind of acknowledgement," she said about pattern drafters in general. It was never about being famous. It was about being seen as someone who knew what she was doing. But the world had changed. Now it was about the person.
When Fitting Got Interesting: Finding Her Expertise
Somewhere in the middle of all of this — the YouTube, the contract work, the community — Saremy got curious about fitting.
Not fitting as in "how do we make everyone comfortable by being size-inclusive." She was interested in the geometry. The spatial, mathematical side of it. How bodies and patterns and cloth actually interact in three dimensions.
It started tickling her. She launched a mini PDF called Fittipedia — just the upper back, with a video series attached. Installments. "It was going to be in installments," she said. "And when I started like trying to write these other chapters, doing it in increments like that, it just didn't work together."
She needed to do all of it.
"I didn't even realize I was writing a book until I was probably halfway through it," she said. "And this is a 480 page book, you know? I didn't know it was that big for a very long time."
Two years. Two thousand-plus hand-drawn diagrams in Affinity Publisher — a program she'd never used before. Late nights. 16-hour days. Sketching, testing, drafting, revising, drawing on her iPad until 11 p.m. or 11:30 p.m., sitting in the dark with her dog snoring next to her, the house asleep.
"I think it's a very lonely job, you know, when you're writing a book," she said. "And I am a very solo person anyway."
Her family didn't even know. "I had told my mom I was working on a book, and she was like, wait, book?" Her daughter didn't know. "I would much rather be like, hey, look, I wrote a book. And they're like, what? Than be stringing them along for a year, telling them, I'm writing a book, my book, my book."
So she didn't mention it. Just kept going. Pressing forward. Knowing what the diagrams needed to be, knowing what the book needed to contain, and just... doing it.
The Loneliness and the Finish Line
By the time Saremy had finished writing — all 480 pages, all 2,000+ diagrams — she felt like she'd been trying to put jello in a ziploc bag.
She had the recipe, it was just about finished, and it was massive. But she didn't know how to shove it into bite-sized, publishable pieces. She'd set up her file correctly in Affinity (she'd done her research). Now what? Library of Congress numbers. Printing platforms. ISBNs. All the decisions that seemed small but could potentially set her up bad or good.
She needed someone to email and say, "What's this? I don't understand."
That's when she found Tori and the Self Publishing Incubator.
She didn't need SPI to edit the book in depth. She'd already done that work with testers, the way pattern drafters test patterns. She needed a team. One person to hold her hand through the platform decisions. One person to say, "Click here, not there." Monthly meetings where someone would tell her exactly what to do next.
The scheduled accountability meetings were everything.
"I'm a person who, as soon as I have an obligation, I get very whiny," Saremy said. But once she was on the Zoom: "She just did my to-do list for me. This is great."
Every month, she'd sit down with Tori for thirty minutes. How's it going? Here's what comes next. And if there was something confusing — a jargon-heavy button, a decision she didn't know how to make — they'd share a screen, and Tori would walk her through it. Not a chatbot. A real person who had done this before and could say, "Yeah, I know this is confusing. Here's why."
"Having access to a human being you can ask a question to at any given moment is so valuable," Saremy said. "Just knowing that I have someone in my corner to rely on."
What Publishing Actually Did
The book launched to her peers. To people in the home sewing world who had been following her work for eight years. To community members who saw her as a teacher and an expert and someone worth listening to.
She shared that she got feedback, excitement, recognition, and something shifted internally.
"I got feedback from peers or people who had been cheering me on, like from the home sewing world, as home sewists, as audience members, they were giving me that feedback and it hit me," she said. "I felt for the first time in a long time not insecure."
That's the result. Not sales numbers and not pre-orders. It's the feeling of security.
"I felt like I finally got the job," she said, "and I've been interviewing for it for eight years."
Because before the book, everything felt like she was constantly proving herself to people who would never quite believe she was as good as she actually was. But a 480-page book with 2,000 diagrams? That's proof and so much value, helping her establish trust and authority in her industry.
"The world knows what I'm capable of a little bit now," she said. "I think it's because it's like, I did do this. This is me. And I did all of it. Like I did all of it. It was from my own brain."
Not algorithm-fed. Not followers. Not trending audio. Just her knowledge, her perspective, her way of seeing fitting and geometry and how cloth works on the page for everyone to see and use.
Hey Tori Takeaway
You have a book in you, too.
Explore what that might look like. What could you spend hours talking about? What stories do you love to tell?
You don't have to tell everyone you're writing it. You don't have to "announce your book" a year in advance. Write it. Finish it. Then tell the world. The announcement is the book itself.
If you need a team for accounability and editing or just for getting across the finish line, the Self-Publishing Incubator was designed for you. Someone to say "click here," someone to answer the weird questions.
The book may not make you famous. It might not change your revenue stream overnight. But it will do something different: it will make you feel like yourself. Like your expertise is real, becasue it is.
What's Next
Volume two is already in motion: Fitopedia: An Encyclopedia of Fitting Adjustments for the Lower Body and Torso, or the pants book. The one everyone's been asking for.
She just got a dress form for pattern testing and sampling, she's in the sketching phase.
About Saremy Duffy
Saremy is a pattern drafter, author, instructor, and expert in the home sewing space.
Website: https://sewsew.live/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sewsewlive/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/sewsewlive
Buy Fitopedia:An Encyclopedia of Fitting Adjustments for the Upper Body and Sleeve https://sewsew.live/collections/fitopedia/products/sew-sew-fitopedia
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart, and other booksellers
Do You Have a Book in You?
If Saremy's story resonates — if you know you have expertise, you've done the research, you've built something substantial, but something's keeping it from existing in the world — the Self Publishing Incubator is built for exactly this moment. Not for writers who need the whole journey. For people who have built their book and need the team to help them ship it.
Your expertise, your story, deserves to be shared. Unlock the book you were meant to write.
Discover the proven framework for turning your patterns, techniques, or stories into a published reality. Designed specifically for pattern designers, teachers, and service providers in the fiber arts industry.
Join Tori McElwain, Founder of Self-Publishing Incubator, Live on Zoom.
September 24th 1 PM ET (10 AM PT)
SPI gives you a structured path (accountability meetings, a roadmap, editors and technical support), a real person asking "how's it going" every month, and access to someone who can answer the questions that feel too small or too weird to ask the internet.
Book a free 30-minute strategy session with Tori — no pressure, just clarity on whether SPI is your next step.
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