St. Elmo resident Bekah Tuggy spends most of her day in stitches, creating dresses to flatter the figures of her customers.
“I guess I learned from my mother,” said Tuggy. “She’s not a seamstress, but she got me started. I made a lot of awful clothes when I was a kid and a teenager. They started looking better when I turned 16 or 17 and started paying attention to what I was doing.”
Bekah Tuggy creates dresses for her customers through her home business, Clever Fingers.Tuggy graduated from Covenant College in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree in music, but had already earned an associate’s degree in an engineering graphics program while living in South Carolina. She said the engineering degree is responsible for truly furthering her sewing abilities.
“It was not a graphic design program like how people think, but more focused on architectural drawing,” said Tuggy, who had to learn to take apart images in her head to switch them back and forth between two and three dimensions. “It helped my sewing drastically. It taught me to take a look at the underlying structure of the dress from pictures.”
Tuggy said she makes dresses according to a pattern or can create a pattern for the person. She doesn’t specialize in any particular style, but utilizes whatever pattern will positively accent her customer’s figure. She often draws inspiration from nature in her patterns and stitching.
Recently Tuggy turned her creative skills to a new project, designing a square to represent St. Elmo that will be added to the city of Chattanooga quilt this summer and displayed in City Hall.