I'm Helen. Each Secret Lentil piece is designed and hand made by me. Nothing is mass produced. I don't use patterns. I build each piece by combining ... uhh, lets see: my artistic senses and skills with the ever-shifting parameters inherent to working with found materials. That sounds important. Then toss in my bad childhood, my sense of humor, memories of playing in the woods and staring at things there for hours, my own need for objects to be self-contained at the same time they are as expansive as all of nature, like seedpods, my ideas about what clothing should do for people, and a lot of rules in my head about what goes where.

My work is intuitive. I create through my own process of fabric alchemy: it is not traditional sewing and these are not traditional clothes. What they are is unusual, durable, comfortable, flexible, funky, fun, solid, freaky, geeky, earthy, and mildly addicting.

So Secret Lentil is a line of clothing - and then again, no, it really isn't. It's more like an art project that produces clothes - unusual, artistic clothes made from recycled fabrics. It's probably shaped more like a spiral than a line, just as I am more of a sculptor than a seamstress.

It all happens in a big drafty warehouse studio in Syracuse NY. You can visit me! I have a dressing room and racks of clothes for you to shop from. And mildly sloppy grammar. Plus I just inherited two big plants. I am trying not to kill them.