Great British Sewing Bee’s Glasgow winner shares top tips in new book
Medical student reveals how she first got into sewing
LIKE most students, Serena Baker is up to her eyes in textbooks and tests as she faces the final stretch of her degree course.
Unlike her peers, however, the 23- year- old medical student from Glasgow’s Southside has also managed to appear on primetime TV, win a nationally- adored sewing show and write a book.
“It’s been a mad and busy couple of years, but in a good way,” smiles Serena, who was The Great British Sewing Bee’s first Scottish, and youngest ever, winner when she was crowned champion in 2021. “It’s two years since we filmed the show, one and a half years since I ‘ officially’ won so life is slowly returning to normal.
“I’m at uni, doing exams and placements and that’s the focus now.”
She adds: “To have been able to write my own book, though, is an amazing thing.”
Serena Sews is a lovely collection of designs and projects from the mind of Britain’s best amateur sewer, with easy- to- follow guides and practical tips, all with sustainability at its heart.
“I knew I wanted to write about sustainability
– a move away from fast fashion and cheap trends,” she says. “I always loved charity shops when I was a teenager, and mending things and adjusting them to make them wearable.
“In the first lockdown, I started re- fashioning I may just have made up that word which for me meant looking at my wardrobe and using what I had to create new things to wear.
“There was stuff in my wardrobe I knew I’d never wear again, but I didn’t want to throw those things out because they had such good memories attached to them.”
She adds, thoughtfully:
“I actually learned a lot during that time. It’s a very different way of sewing and it taught me things I didn’t know about patterns and design. In a cost of living crisis, too, it’s a useful skill to have.
“I really loved doing it, so the book is a way of sharing that with other people.”
Sewing has been part of Serena’s life since she was a teenager.
“I just wanted to try it, so I dug out my mum’s old sewing machine, bought some fabric online and made a dress,” she says, adding with a laugh: “It was a very simple pattern, fan shapes on a really nice black background, no sleeves with a zip in the back and flared skirt.
“I really liked it but I didn’t wear it very often, so I turned it into a wrap top which I actually wore in an episode of the Sewing Bee.”
Serena’s mum, Cathy, took up sewing again when her daughter discovered it as a hobby.
“We sewed a lot together she hadn’t done it for years but she picked it back up again and we’d go fabric shopping together and work on projects together,” says Serena, who grew up in Newton Mearns.
“Apart from my mum I didn’t really know anyone who sewed, and especially not many young people, so watching the Sewing Bee was a great source of inspiration for me.
“That’s part of the reason I applied, and it really makes my day now when young people come up to me and say they have been inspired by watching me and the other young contestants on the series.”
Serena impressed the TV show’s judges Esme Young and Patrick Grant with a range of stunning garments, including paper bag shorts, a cute child’s raincoat, a button- down sun dress and
a stunning, Killing Eveinspired, acid yellow dress.
The former Mearns Castle High pupil is now in her final few months of a medicine degree at Edinburgh University. After graduation, she will begin her junior doctor training.
“I’m not sure what area
I want to go into yet, but I know what I don’t want to do,” she says, with a grin.
“Everyone says I’d be really good at surgery, because of all the stitching, but that’s not for me.
“I’ll still be sewing, absolutely. Medicine is such an intense career, the work is never- ending, really, so it’s important to find something that allows you to completely switch off.”
She adds: “For me, that’s sewing. It’s like meditation.”
Serena Sews, from Black and White Publishing, is out now.