Woman of the clothy Baileyville fiber artist designs outfits to dye for

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Nan Sepik’s clothes make you feel like a natural woman.

In the showroom of Daylily Weaving and Design Works, the business she runs from her home in the Washington County town of Baileyville, dip-dyed organic-cotton undies share space with luxurious woven chenille scarves, bright little tams and racks of softly mottled pants, skirts and tops, imprinted with fern fronds, pine needles or sage leaves.

“I read about leaf printing and fell in love with the idea of being able to produce something from nature,” Sepik said over coffee in her sunroom as a pair of English setters lounged on the couch nearby. “The designs of leaves or flowers are so incredibly unique.”

Nature is a common thread in Sepik’s designs, from the subtle variations in color in her woven coats, hats and scarves, to the gentle marbling that occurs when she hand-dyes her line of flowing rayon clothing. When she sees a hue she likes, in a flower, say, she’ll study the shading of the petals and convert it to color percentages so she can create a dye or combine string on her loom to achieve the same effect.

“The colors are all my own,” she said. “They’re all mixes. There’s no single straight color in the whole place. I’ve come up with some really ugly colors and some really nice ones that I can never make again, but if I can reproduce it, it becomes a standard color.”

Some of her standard colors are blueprint blue, bright berry red and soft taupe. On the underwear, bikini panties that Sepik calls “Daylily Bloomers,” anything goes – whether it’s a blue-purple dip dye or a swirly rainbow tie-dye with stars stamped on the behind. When she hangs the bloomers out to dry, “I have this psychedelic clothesline,” she said.

“I have no pretensions of being a New York designer,” she said of her clothing, which is more fun and functional than faddish. “I just want to make pretty clothes and I love color – nothing fancy. I w3ant something people can wear to work.”

That suits Suellen Dow just fine. The manager of the Princeton branch of Machias Savings Bank is one of Sepik’s best customers. She owns six or eight of her dyed rayon outfits and wears them everywhere – to work, to formal meetings, even out to dinner.

“They’re beautiful,” Dow said. “Everything’s very comfortable. It looks good. It feels good. It just works.

Part of the appeal, Dow says, is Sepik’s focus on natural fibers and colors.

“Nan really works her personality into her clothes,” Dow said. “She’s really into nature and plants and puts that into her creativity.”

The women met when Dow served on the board at the St. Croix Regional Family Health Center in Princeton. Sepik worked there as a nurse practitioner and the two became fast friends.

“She’s a kindred spirit,” Dow said. “She has a spark.”

Sepik does have a spark. She’s a funny, spunky woman filled with passion for her work. Sipping coffee from a mug that reads “Live Fast, Dye Young and Leave Good Looking Warps” – weaver speak for looms full of woven cloth – she described the winding path that led her to her current career.

“I was probably the only kid in town to get a dress form for my 13th birthday and I thought it was great,” she said.

When she was growing up in western Pennsylvania, Sepik loved everything related to fabric. When it was time for her to choose a career path, however, her options were limited – pretty much teaching and nursing – and the thought of making a living as a “fiber artist” wasn’t even an option.

“I don’t think I would’ve even known how to begin,” she said.

So she became a nurse practitioner and eventually met her husband, Greg. He knew of her love for fiber, and gave her a spinning wheel for their first Christmas together. When the couple moved to Morgantown, W.Va., so Greg could take a job at West Virginia University, Nan joined the weavers and spinners guild there, but after a while, she decided she didn’t want to spin anymore.

Shortly after they moved to Maine 25 years ago, when her husband came to the University of Maine in Orono to get his doctorate in wildlife biology, Sepik took up weaving. When a position opened up at the Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge in Baring, they moved to nearby Baileyville.

They raised their family there, and had two daughters, Emily and Molly. In the meantime, Sepik continued to weave as a hobby and acquired several looms, including a “funny looking, all-metal thing,” that she affectionately called John Deere.

In 1998, Greg died unexpectedly, causing Sepik to re-evaluate her priorities. She decided she wanted to change her career, and she knew it was the right time when her subscriptions to fiber-arts journals outnumbered her medical journals, which she had to force herself to read.

“I decided it was time to make some changes and I essentially quit my job,” Sepik said. “I walked away from the medical end and did what I’ve been wanting to do since I was 13. My first love has always been cloth, clothing, so it was natural that I settle into that.”

If it took a while for Sepik to decide what she wanted to do, it took her even longer to decide she made the right choice.

“The first three or four months after I quit, at least once a week I’d think, ‘Oh, God, what have I done?'” she said. “Once I decided to do it and take myself seriously, the business just exploded. I think it took that thinking of myself seriously to do that.”

It also took a lot of soul-searching. Of finding her true rhythms. Of finding her own schedule when her previous one had been dictated by a timecard. There were days she would weave until the wee hours of the morning and days she would study dyeing techniques. One night, she and her younger daughter, Emily, stayed up all night, blaring music and experimenting with a method called Shibori, which involves tying off sections of fabric to block out the dye.

“We made a mess; God did we make a mess, but we really learned,” Sepik said.

“Those kinds of nights are the best, when it’s late and we’re up and just going,” Emily said during a phone interview. “It gets the creative juices flowing.”

Emily, 21, attends Antioch College in Ohio, which requires its students to work every other semester as part of a co-op. Though her major is photojournalism, she was drawn to her mother’s weaving and dyeing.

“Whenever I was home for a week or two weeks I would get totally into what she was discovering,” she said. “I thought maybe I could work with Mom. I wanted to learn all these things she was doing and take more than a week. It really worked out beautifully. She’s great to work with – she’s excited about things. She wouldn’t get mad if I made mistakes.”

For Sepik, mistakes are part of the learning process. Most of this is new to her, too, and she gets excited just talking about it.

“It’s really really fun to just go out and collect stuff,” she said, walking down to her basement, where she dyes her clothes and prints them with leaves and plants. “You get stuff, you try it out and sometimes it works, and sometimes it’s just a mess.”

She squeezes black fabric ink into a clean Styrofoam meat tray – the kind you get at the supermarket – and adds a bit of water to thin it out. Then, she takes a pressed leaf out of a heavy book and paints the ink on with a fat stencil brush. She places a block of spare fabric on a metal table covered with a blue tarp and places the leaf, ink side down, onto the fabric. She applies pressure and lifts up the leaf to reveal a perfect print.

“Isn’t that cool?” she asks. “It’s just so amazing to me.”

It may be amazing to Sepik, but to her loyal customers, the prints are just an extension of her creativity and another reason to love her clothes.

“She has a lot of people who stop by periodically to see how she’s doing,” Dow said. “She has a following of people.”

Though Sepik sells Daylily designs in other parts of the state, most of her customers are in her own backyard.

“It’s surprising how many things I’ve sold in Washington County,” she said. “I still get an absolute thrill out of the idea that someone wants to buy my stuff and wear it. When I see someone out on the street wearing my clothes I get a charge. Whoa! That’s the big one.”

Many people would consider Down East Maine a difficult place to start a clothing business, but the location has been a boon to Sepik. In addition to the lack of distractions, she’s also found a caring network of people who are rooting for her to succeed, even when she’s feeling blue – or pink, or green.

“Nobody thinks it’s strange that I go to the store and my hands may be red or blue or purple,” she said, laughing. “People are very friendly here. It’s a nice place to live. It’s warm and friendly and supportive.”

Daylily designs are available at Melissa’s Finer Things in Rockland, Island Artisans in Bar Harbor, Guagus River Inn in Milbridge, and Quoddy Crafters in Eastport. Daylily Weaving and Dyeworks is located at 2269 South Princeton Road in Baileyville and is open by chance or appointment. For information, call 427-6070.