Mar is short for Marley. It's also Spanish for ocean.

I learned to sew when I was nine, making simple dresses for girls in Africa. I still use the same machine. It was my grandmother's before it was mine.

She is the reason any of this exists. She studied fashion design, and I grew up with her old sketches. A few of them were framed on my bedroom wall.

Then one day my mom came home with a stack of linen samples, and the only thing I could think about was what I could make from them.

I have always been the friend people come to when they need to borrow a handbag, or jewelry, or sunglasses. So it was always going to be accessories. What I had never seen anywhere was a purse made from linen, and it seemed to me like it would make the best beach bag, the best everyday tote, the simple thing you pick up without thinking. That was the first one, and it grew from there.

Now the fabrics find me.

My mom keeps coming home with reclaimed luxury drapery and upholstery, and half my bedroom has turned into a sewing studio. I started sewing again about five months ago, after moving back home from college.

Someone told me once that they had never seen a linen bag like mine. That one stuck.

The name is also the plan. A bazaar is full of other people's stalls, and one day I want Mars Bazaar to be a collective, with other small makers in it alongside me.

I love every bag I make and I would keep all of them if I could. Making them to share is the whole point.

Mar

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Everything is handmade, from 100% linen, reclaimed luxury fabrics and hand-crocheted yarn. No factories, no repeated patterns, nothing made twice.

The linen is chosen a length at a time. The reclaimed fabrics are the interesting half: upholstery, eyelet, suede cord, offcuts of beautiful material that were headed for a bin. Because those come in finite amounts, once a fabric runs out that piece cannot be made again. That isn't a marketing line, it's just what happens when you work this way.

Fast fashion turned “handmade” into a marketing word instead of a fact. Most bags on the market are made in identical runs by people the buyer will never meet. These aren't. Every piece is cut, stitched, photographed and sold by the person who made it.

The brand is growing into hand-strung jewelry, small accessories, and film photography prints. Some of those photographs are mine. Others are by photographers I wanted to make room for, which is where the bazaar half of the name starts to mean something.