Why the Playboys wear wool jerseys in the Tx summer.

Sometimes. When they’re forced to. Sorry fellers.

So now you’ve been told the tale of No. 1 Bear and The Tiniest Jersey.

If you came here for rhinestones and flamboyantly ostentatious stage-wear, and are curious why we’ve suddenly turned a decidedly sporty-spice corner- stay with me for a moment. 

I don’t know how deeply aware I was of the specific overlap of the Baseball/Western-wear venn diagram- but at some point, years into the process of trying to rebuild my first chainstitch embroidery machine, the connection became clear. 

Around 2008/9 or so, eight years after the birth of my first child and approximately 4 years after our second babe came along, my childhood love of baseball, which had gone dormant in the all consuming early days of child rearing and business building- came roaring back to life. 

(I’ve found, looking back now at my 50 years of observable behavior, that I am a person for whom passions are plentiful but consistency is elusive. Meaning, I tend to hyper-focus on specific interests to the exclusion of all else- that is, until some enigmatic DJ presses play and I’m sent into a musical chairs-like scramble for the pervasive interest that might next capture my focus.) 

It was somewhere around 9th grade, after an unfortunate encounter with an overly enthusiastic catcher at home plate- baseball, my childhood love (technically softball, as was ordained by the relative gender non-parity of the early eighties) began to take up less real estate in my psyche. 

I slid, she pounced, tendons were torn, seasons were ended- and (cue the mytho-DJ) my athletic aspirations shifted to testing the waters of a new, more artistic identity. 

My nascent post-sporty persona emerged initially via wardrobe choices; wherein once my No. 1 Bear jersey signaled my tribal affiliation, post-injury my costuming began to take a turn for the weird- a move I hoped might camouflage my subtle infiltration of Pacific Grove High’s artsy theatrical crowd. 

Artisté identity successfully unlocked, I relished the freedom of expression and adolescent rebelliousness my clothing choices allowed for. This textile taste-testing and identity landscaping eventually led me to both art school and subsequently western wear, and its iconic (and sometimes ironic) aesthetic (as I talked more about here). 

Art school was followed by my cowgirl stint in Montana (where yes, I wore chaps and a stetson with impunity) which largely informed the children’s clothing line I launched some years later in 2001. 

(Although the children’s clothing I designed were largely remembered ((by those few who actually remember them)) as vintage western-wear inspired, the die-hards might recall that there was a secondary aesthetic influence integrated into the line as well- throwback baseball uniforms- No. 1 Bear abides, my friends, No. 1 Bear abides.)

This brings us back around to 2008-ish, four or five years into randomly tinkering away at my mysterious and compelling Singer 114-w103 and coming to terms with the fact that my children’s clothing line was a massive financial failure (another story for another day). Desperate for distraction and married to a lifetime Giants die-hard, the almost daily ritual of dialing up a game began as a salve and quickly, aided by the cathartic reemergence of the wind at the Giants back, became a religion.

2010 brought about both the Giants first world series win as a West Coast team* and my first semi-successful chainstitch-forward garments. It would be a few years before I relaunched my business to reflect this long-awaited achievement, but fortunately as i was putting in the countless hours on my still-elusive chainstitch machine, deconstructing the vestiges of Ramonster (my children’s line) and laying the foundation for what would become Fort Lonesome, I was buoyed by the scrappy and unbeatable spirit of my team and found solace diving headlong into my rekindled love of baseball. 

It was in this era of cocooning (often so incredibly uncomfortable but in hindsight often annoyingly fertile) that I discovered the thread *PUN INTENDED YES FOLKS LITERALLY* connecting the western wear and baseball worlds that so captured my curiosity. 

Chainstitch embroidery!

I believe it was due to one of my many frustratingly dead-end online searches for information about chainstitch embroidery machines that I discovered what quickly became a new favorite site, Uni-Watch.com, a site written and curated by a true life-long uniform obsessive. It was on uni-watch that I read about the manufacturers that employed banks of skilled chainstitchers to apply the decorative elements of certain teams uniforms- the most recognizable and last remaining major league team donning this form of embroidered jersey being the St. Louis Cardinals. 

I was able to read about the myriad minor league teams that used embroidered uniforms, many of which were being brought back to life by a new company building a cult following among true baseball nerds making reproductions of minor and negro league jerseys, Ebbets Field Flannels.**

Ebbets and Uni-Watch, along with my burgeoning chainstitch skills, sucked me far enough down the rabbit hole of uniform-as-art to feel called to reach out to Austin’s sandlot ambassador and nurturer of creative community, Jack Sanders. This was 2013- the formative era of what has become a globally vibrant sandlot league- largely born of the ecosystem created by Jack and his team, the Texas Playboys here in Austin. 

Jack and I met in what was then my backyard studio, and immediately connected over a shared appreciation of the dynamic mythological implications of baseball that transcended mere sport. I filled him in on the disappearance of chainstitch from what was once an opportunity to infuse a player’s kit with the quirk of a maker's mark- the impossibly one-of-a-kind nature of hand-cranked embroidery. He enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to replatform this lost art by allowing me to help reimagine the Playboy’s uniforms- together we opted to use an Ebbets gray wool (much to the dismay of many of the team members attempting to play ball in the Texas summer) jersey with a Ft Lonesome design and embroidery. If there ever was a thread-based field of dreams, this was it. 

Since 2014, when the Playboys debuted their wool (sorry, fellers) embroidered jerseys, we’ve gone on to craft two more iterations of Playboys jerseys, some with embroidery some without, but all of them made with an appreciation for the mythic heft of what it means to don a jersey. What an honor. 

To be able to weave together * ANOTHER INTENDED PUN*  two of my most profound loves- baseball and western wear- into this weird business I have has managed to provide an almost continuous throughline of infinity loop inspiration- quite a feat for this musical chairs inclined monkey mind. 

I have more to say about the relationship between baseball jerseys and pearl snaps but this has gone on long enough for today. 

If you’re in Austin, come on out to a Playboys game at their home field, the LongTime. I’ll be there, and I never go anywhere! Turns out it takes some baseball, some pals, some snacks and a job to do to get me out of the house. Thank you, Jack, for keeping my misanthropic streak in check.

*Prior to 1958, San Francisco’s home team was The Seals, for whom not only did Joe DiMaggio play but so did my husband’s grandfather, Carl Sever, thus establishing the Sever family legacy of Giants religiosity carried on now not only by my father in law and husband, but enthusiastically by my daughter Ramona, who i forced to model the toddler versions of Rockford Peaches-esque uniforms I’d aspirationally assumed would rocket my children’s apparel business into the stratosphere. They did not.

**After I got my machine up and running, and had some help in the form of Dana, Christina and Amrit- one of our first consistent production jobs was doing all the chainstitch for Ebbets Field Flannels- back when we were really one or two of the only companies working in chainstitch embrodery. We got to reproduce myriad vintage designs for the company. It was an incredible learning experience!