ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, March 10, 1996 TAG: 9603110006
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: DUBLIN
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
Call them the adjusters.
If you can show them a picture or describe something you want to wear or how you want your house to look, they can make it.
The three - all veteran seamstresses - make up Professional Tailoring & Alterations & Custom Window Treatments, operating out of a Dublin shop next to Ciro's Pizza.
"We've been open a year," said Zella Irvin, who started the business.
"I just got started making my own clothes in my younger days. People asked me to do some for them," said Zella Irvin, who started the business a year ago.
She worked at the AT&T plant in Fairlawn before it closed five years ago. When her job there ended, she decided to put her childhood talent to work. "I thought I'd just reach out and do my own thing," she said.
For a while, she did alterations for Leggett's department store, but people kept asking her to alter clothing not purchased there. "So I decided to go out on my own."
She soon was joined by Jo Ann Smith, who also had been doing alterations of a sort since childhood.
"I started making doll clothes, and I took three years of [sewing] in school, and I've done it ever since," Smith said.
"I've tried to quit several times, and I just keep coming back," said Betty Linville, who joined the enterprise in May. Both she and Smith live in Pulaski County. "I like the house kind of thing, and decorating."
They do custom tailoring, alterations and repairs on everything from jeans to formals, bridal gowns, custom-made draperies and blinds. And they will tackle just about anything else anybody wants in the way of alterations.
"You don't know what might come in the door," Smith said. "I made a padded tractor seat."
A man brought in a ragged cloth hunting vest, showing wear and tear from having been snagged in the bushes and brambles over the year. He wanted a leather vest just like it. He got it, and liked it so much that he wore it for show and continued wearing the raggedy one for hunting so he wouldn't scratch up the new one.
They have worked on a trampoline, a boat cover and a motorcycle cover in recent weeks.
They made a dress for a 3-year-old girl patterned on one worn by her Barbie doll. They do constant repairs and alterations to Pulaski County High School football players' and cheerleaders' uniforms, as well as uniforms for fire departments, lifesaving crews and nurses.
Basically, the women say, if they can find a picture giving a general idea of what the customer wants, they can make it. "Lots of times, they don't know what they want," Linville said.
They keep their own stock of magazine pictures showing bedrooms decorated various ways with drapes and curtains. They are accumulating their own photo albums of rooms they have done.
The shop is outfitted with six sewing machines and an ironing board, and is lined with samples of various kinds of fabrics. Irvin said it is the largest fabric selection available in the area.
It also is one of the few places where buttons usually can be found to match one lost from a coat or dress.
Irvin's husband, Richard, who works at Industrial Drives in Radford, remodeled their present quarters when the three moved this year from a smaller shop across the road.
"If it has to do with something you wear, or windows," Richard said, "we do it."
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL DELLINGER/Staff. Betty Linville (left), Zella Irvinby CNBand Jo Ann Smith (right) operate Professional Tailoring &
Alterations in Dublin. color.