About Teresa Sigmon and Sew Like A Pro™.
Hello! Thanks SEW much for wanting to more about me, my online sewing school and all that my company Sew Like A Pro™ offers.
I’m a dressmaker and sewing instructor, a retired professional Dancesport competitor and ballroom dance instructor, as well as a rather dreadful hobby ice skater.
I love teaching, hiking, kayaking, animals, archery, my family and friends. While spontaneity, honesty, laughter and being outdoors feeds my soul.
I began my dressmaking company, Seams Sensational, in 1993. I created one-of-a-kind ballroom dance costumes for clients all over North America, from beginning students to U.S. Champions.
As the decades passed, I realized that making women's competition costumes is about much more than fabric and rhinestones; it is about helping women look and feel beautiful so they are happier, more confident and empowered by their dress choices and their femininity.
Being in front of the camera teaching about women's dance and skate costumes is the most natural thing I have ever done. Every minute is sew much fun.
On March 26, 2014, the idea for a comprehensive dance and skate dressmaker school, Sew Like A Pro™, popped into my head while I sat at the sewing machine making a dress.
I immediately got up from the sewing machine, starting jumping and down fist pumping the air, and then ran in circles around my apartment like dogs do when they're super excited. Seriously. It was an awesome moment.
A week later, I had purchased studio lights, two cameras and began filming my first-ever video blog with a ballroom dancer for whom I was making a competition dress.
I have been a feverish, mostly-one-woman show ever since.
As of this writing, there are over two hundred Sew Like A Pro™ sewing school members in nineteen countries.
Trust me when I say I had to learn a lot of new skills to create, promote and maintain the world’s first (and only) interactive, online sewing school teaching ballroom and country dancers, ice and artistic roller skaters to make professional-quality competition dresses for women.
I think learning how to create, maintain and expand all my sewing programs is equal to learning how to make a custom dance or skate dress when you barely know how to sew.
That is to say, not easy, and you may temporarily lose your sanity. However, once complete there is nothing like the pride of accomplishment!
Teresa Sigmon models a dress made by Sew Like A Pro™ member, Sherri Hansen, seen in the middle of the image.
I love that I have the personal experience to offer a full arsenal of sewing training to help as many sewists as possible!
In 2022 I created the Dressmaker Business Academy. This business coaching program offers what I believe is the world's only business coaching specifically for those who earn money sewing dance and skate dresses, theater costumes, wedding dresses ... and really anything custom-made by a small sewing business.
2023 was the first year for the Fabulous Fitting Techniques Course. I created this course to provide dressmaking training on how to work with, and fit, stretch fabrics for dance and skate costumes.
The Fitting Techniques Course is perfect for those who sew costumes for young children. It is also ideal for folks who want a "summer school" on working with stretch fabrics .... rather than a year or two at the "university" getting the comprehensive dressmaker training of the Sew Like A Pro™ programs.
I enjoy inventing ways to connect with my followers and Sew Like A Pro™ members, in whichever program they enrolled. Zoom and high speed internet are my best friends for teaching anytime anywhere!
When I am not sitting in front of my laptop running the school, I escape into nature.
I like volunteering with local, state and federal agencies to help improve the world in which we live. My mom and I pulled invasive weeds in Glen Canyon and twice picked up trash on Lake Powell. I also pick up trash as I walk in the woods or on the beach.
In 2014, I taught at my local women’s prison hoping to inspire women to discover who they are, who they want to be and how to bridge that gap ®. Curiously, I now teach similar things when I host an extended dress design challenge.
I began working fire support in California in 2017. I do laundry for fire fighters and other personnel at “fire camp”. It’s an amazing experience that allows me to take a break from my laptop and be around other people in a supportive environment.
Over my adult years, I have rescued or fostered thirty-two cats and five dogs. A few of them became my companions for the duration of their lives, but most of them I got healthy, spayed or neutered and then found them fur-ever homes, or returned them to their worried humans.
Teresa holds her adventure cat, Sophie Fiona, at sunrise on Mt. St. Helens in Washington.
In March 2018, my cat Sophie Fiona and I began a road trip I thought would last only a few months.
Um, clearly I cannot count.
Years later, I still have most of my belongings in storage and I am officially called a "digital nomad".
Traveling is a great way to promote Sew Like A Pro™, meet my sewing school members and explore this beautiful, amazing country I call home.
Click here to learn more about my experiences working fire camp, my crazy long road trip and how I became a digital nomad.
Whatever your reason for reading this, thanks for being here. I hope we stay in touch.
Teresa Sigmon
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Dance details about Teresa Sigmon.
Teresa Sigmon during her competitive dancing years between 1989 and 1995.
Teresa founded Seams Sensational in 1993 while she was still competing in the Theater Arts/Cabaret division as well as teaching.
Within a year, she had four employees and had become one of the top designers in the American ballroom dance scene. As a result of working with hundreds of women across the U.S. and Canada, she finely honed her craft of creating stunning dresses that fit women of all ages, shapes and sizes – bringing out the best in each figure.
She teaches all her dressmaker tips inside the Sew Like A Pro™ sewing programs.
Teresa began dancing at the age of five. Ten years of strict ballet left her hungry for more fun and less painful pointe work. She changed instructors and fell in love with Jazz and Modern. At age sixteen, she had the honor of attending Governor’s School of North Carolina in the area of Modern dance. Teresa also received a North Carolina Teaching Fellows Scholarship for dance.
While attending N.C. State University School of Design, she missed dancing and called a local ballroom dance studio to see about taking lessons. As luck would have it, at age eighteen Teresa became an instructor instead of a student (which was her true calling giving that she had been “teaching” aerobics and dance routines since high school.)
After only one year of ballroom training, Teresa was chosen to partner a nationally renowned dancer.
In a classic case of “the road not taken”, she left behind her college days and fun times Dirty Dancing with her fellow dance instructors and began training competitively in Phoenix, Arizona.
Teresa’s competitive accomplishments include:
- U.S. Professional Rhythm Champion and U.S. National Top Six Finalist, 1989-1991
- Chosen to participate in a goodwill dance tour in Russia. Traveled and performed for two weeks in Moscow and St. Petersburg, October, 1991
- U.S. Professional Rising Star Theater Arts Champion, 1994, and Open Top Six Finalist, 1993-1995
- Performed in the American Pavilion at Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida, 1994
Teresa Sigmon and Jeff Robinson. 1994 Theater Arts/Cabaret Division.