Deb shares her passion for textiles and sewing through a variety of lectures, trunk shows and hands-on sewing classes. She also loves to share historical and often hysterical anecdotes about her vintage samples. She used 20th century sewing technology to take hand smocking to the sewing machine. Her technique looks so good that you have to look twice to tell if the smocking was done by hand or machine! She has written books on machine smocking as well as instructional CD videos and a smocked embroidery design disk.

Along with writing smocking books, she has also written for many major sewing publications such as Sew News, Threads, Sew Beautiful and Creative Machine Embroidery. She has appeared on the America Sews program with Sue Hausmann as well as Martha’s Sewing Room with Martha Pullen.

She is a Husqvarna Viking Educational Consultant as well as a licensed Martha Pullen heirloom instructor. She teaches and travels throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. Her classes feature both hand and machine sewing from silk ribbon embroidery, and fine heirloom sewing to home-dec embellishment. She has an extensive collection of vintage textiles, garments and antique laces that she uses for inspiration and for trunk shows, to demonstrate the handwork of yesterday with the machine work of today.