Jean Ferlesch

Jean Lugrin Ferlesch lives and works facing the ocean in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. She has been a New Yorker since 1975 after she graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in interior design. For thirty years she enjoyed a career as a store designer, designing department stores, new retail brands and the occasional restaurant. Jean approaches design with an inate ability to draw; in fact, for a short time in the 90's, she taught perspective rendering at Parson's School of Design in NYC. 

Jean was raised in Hamden, Ct, a suburb of New Haven in a house her parents built on converted farm land surrounded by cow pastures and woods. Her mother taught me to sew on her old heavy Singer console machine which she ran obsessivly after weekly trips to Horwitz's, the fabric store in the strip center next to Jean's high school. Throughout my teens  and college years Jean's passion for drawing and sewing never diminished.  She was never without a  jacket to hand embroider, a sweater to knit or a pattern to cut out. When her store design career ended in 2008, Jean decided to follow her bliss; a chance 'encounter' with a home embroidery machine seemed to magically tie together all of her interests and skills: sewing, drawing, design,embroidery and photoshop. Jean threw herself into mastering the art of digitizing her artwork and stitching it out on an embroidery machine. After several years of perfecting the art of creative digitizing, Jean purchased a commercial embroidery machine to produce limited quantities of wall art, wearable accessories, T towels, pillows and clothing embellished with her signature embroideries.