Client Feature: Ironic Embroidery's Ida Bostian talks about her new business

Ironic Embroidery founded by Ida Bostian and a former student of hers, Sam Lambert Jr., has just launched it’s business plan this past March.  Their focus is pets and weddings -they can refashion vintage wedding dresses or custom make new ones to fit the unique needs of their clients.  They are currently working on a ragtime wedding outfit set, where they will be embroidering the bride as a pin-up on the grooms shirt.

Ida has been a devoted client of Adorn for a long time.  She is even featured on the homepage of our website getting her makeup done by our owner, Rebecca Hecht.  

Rebecca explains that she is always excited to do Ida’s hair because Ida is so open and willing to try new styles and colors - even if they are purples and pinks.

          Ida taught costume design to students at UNCA for several years; she is still teaching at Brevard College, but is looking forward to this new business of her own.  

Recently, Ida came into Adorn to have her hair done by Rebecca. Sitting in the chair with foils in her hair, she graciously agreed to an interview about her exciting new business.

So, tell me a little bit about your business:

“We’re just starting out.  It’s me and a friend of mine and we do industrial embroidery and we also, oddly, do wedding dresses from scratch, or we do existing dresses to fit the person.  Like right now, we’re working on somebody’s mother’s wedding dress.  It’s from the 80’s, it has the big shoulders and lots of the beading and she wants it to be very different.  So we’re taking the existing dress and re-doing it.”

Do you think you take your work as a professor of costume design and use it as inspiration for this work?

“Most definitely.  As a matter of fact, my company is called Ironic Embroidery and my business partner is a former student of mine.  He [Sam Lambert Jr.] is the one that brought the idea to me.”

How did you decide on what the focus of the business was?

“We really just started talking about it at the beginning of this year, but we didn’t even start it until March.  We had so many ideas that we had trouble narrowing it down, but we did narrow it down to work on pet things and bridal - I don’t know how that happened.  We talked about doing seat covers with embroidery on them, we talked about just anything we could think of.  We would say, ‘Well, we could do that,’ and we just had to narrow and narrow and narrow it down.”

Here are pictures of some of the things Ida had with her from Ironic Embroidery:

A clever dino-inspired cap for a pooch:

A top hat and cape for the most dapper of dogs:

And here are examples of some of Ironic Embroidery's industrial embroidery work:

Pretty cool, huh?