Correspondent photos / Maurita Hoffman Ariel Brockway poses next to a sewing machine in her shop, Mended Apparel.

The first thing Ariel Brockway had ever sewn was her prom dress.

“A peacock feather dress,” she explained.

Now her life revolves around the craft as the owner of Mended Apparel, an apparel shop that repurposes, as Brockway says, vintage clothing, located in downtown Youngstown.

Brockway, who was raised in Southington and graduated from Chalker High School in 2009, said she grew up around sewing as her mother, Tammy, was a quilter.

“I watched her sew, and she was big into fashion, too,” Brockway said.

She admitted, however, she wasn’t much of a sewer initially, but she liked fashion and, in 2014, graduated from Kent State University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in fashion design. There, she fell in love with the craft. Brockway described the sewing classes she took at Kent as “very hands-on.” She credits her sewing skills to the book she used in her classes.

After college, she worked as the lead seamstress at a store called “Art of Cloth” in Chagrin Falls for five years. She described the store as “a womenswear clothing company where all the garments were made in-house and hand dyed.” The store closed in 2018, and Brockway purchased its sewing machines.

Earlier this year she was able to open her own store.

She primarily works with fabric/clothing that’s “pre-1970s,” and described her use of vintage to mean clothing from those eras.

Brockway noted she does not use fabric from “really old clothing, the early 1900s or before,” because she said that those items are history and should be preserved. She said she “upcycles old vintage clothing and fabrics.”

“It’s using things we already have — forgotten fabrics made into beautiful things,” she said.

She’s made clothing cut from 1950s and 1970s tablecloths and pillowcases. Another item, a plaid vest, had its black lining cut from a graduation gown that was given to her.

When repurposing clothing, she uses buttons and zippers made before the 1980s to replicate the style of that era. She likes to keep the tags and labels from repurposed items and sews those labels into the new piece of clothing.

“It’s a way of keeping that name alive, too,” she explained.

Brockway defined her store as “classy, minimalist, fun and whimsical” and a “one-of-a-kind small business, a niche business.”

She said she expects the store “to be a three-year project” to become profitable. Since everything she makes is handmade, she describes her merchandise as “affordable but expensive,” appealing to “a very specific clientele.”

“My clothing is for someone looking for a store that fits their personality,” she said.

Brockway sources her fabric and clothing from many places — estate sales, flea markets and “original fabrics in their original states, including from patchwork quilts, bolts of fabric in

To facilitate her passion for crafting items that reflect the era in which they were originally made, Brockway keeps a filing cabinet of old tissue-paper patterns.

She said when she sees fabric, “It speaks to me and often lets me know which pattern to use for it.

“I love everything I make,” she said. “I make it special. Every garment has a story.”

A wool jacket is one of her all-time favorites. The jacket, a wool tweed, was difficult to make, she said.

“I hate it because it was so hard,” she said, laughing, but admitted it’s her favorite because, “It whispers from the past.

“I like to work with wool,” she continued. “It’s ‘fingerable’ when stitching and the fabric lays so well.”

Brockway currently teaches individual private sewing lessons but said she plans to offer group classes in the future, adding that she is looking for a space large enough. She is also designing a specialty sewing book.

She stressed the importance of learning the techniques first before crafting anything.

“It is much easier to make something than learning how with each project,” she said.

Brockway loves her location on North Phelps Street in downtown Youngstown.

“We’re on the cusp of being something special,” she said. “We’re part of untapped potential.”

She pointed to The Blue Heron antique store a couple doors north of her shop as an example of the “eclectic, diverse” businesses she thinks will help bring shopping back to downtown.

“If we can do it, others can do it,” she said.