Sew it goes

Inspired by past and future, Shelley Henkle has much in store

By RANDALL BARTON

The Portland Tribune, Mar 4, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

L.E. BASKOW / TRIBUNE PHOTOS

When not overseeing her Sellwood shop called Why Not?, Shelley Henkle spends time in her home sewing room, where she creates everything from “button jeans” to signature baby bibs. Her vintage leanings show throughout her store and home, down to the antique dishes and knotty pine paneling.

As a little girl she was known as “the arranger” for the way she would move things about in her mother’s house until she achieved perfection. Shelley Henkle always has had an eye for how things should be put together. It is apparent at once in her Sellwood store, Why Not? (8315 S.E. 13th Ave.), where a fetching array of vintage and reproduction objects from the ’40s and ’50s lift the spirits.

Young mothers come for items like one-of-a-kind bibs faced with embroidered corners from old dish towels. Middle-age baby boomers – like the 55-year-old Henkle herself – are drawn to the displays of vintage dresses, gleaming ceramic bunnies, classic toys and things that suggest comfort. It’s just like visiting Grandma’s house.

The collection of objects triggers a journey back in time, before one was so occupied with the cares of the world. “Whimsy makes you smile,” Henkle says, suggesting it’s “because of the innocence or goodness.”

Henkle was a manufacturer’s rep for 18 years, specializing in children’s lines that she sold to shops and stores like Nordstrom and Hanna Andersson.

“I could do a lot of stuff on the phone at home in my nightgown,” the mother of three says. “It was a great job to have with kids.”

She began making her own line of children’s dresses when her youngest daughter, Katy, was a toddler.

“I got tired of leaving her, even though she was with her grandmother, to go to market in Seattle six times a year for five days,” she says. She sold the repping business in the late ’90s and then hit it big with vintage jeans she’d decorate with tablecloth scraps and old buttons.

“Buttons are like jewels to me,” she says. “Who cares about diamonds and rubies? I want buttons.”

For six years Henkle made jeans, each pair different. The jeans blew out of the shops that carried them. Then one day the orders stopped coming.

As Heidi Klum, host of television’s “Project Runway,” says, “In fashion, one day you’re in, and the next day you’re out.”

Henkle’s next idea was to stage three-day sales in the barn on her Lake Oswego property. Customers were notified by postcard every few months that another sale was about to commence, and she’d fill the barn with antiques and reproductions with a vintage look. In April last year, she opened her store in Sellwood.

‘Create your own world’

Rocking chairs upholstered in patchwork quilts nestle in front of the fireplace at Henkle’s Lake Oswego home. A collection of antique baby dishes lines one wall in the knotty pine kitchen. In a word, the place is cozy.

Upstairs in her sewing room she creates her signature baby bibs, button jeans, swing jackets trimmed with vintage tablecloths, and sailor shirts. Her day is divided between creating in the sewing room and working in the store.

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