Starting when she was a girl in Dyer, Ind., Jen Swearington traveled the path of a fine artist, mostly painting and drawing. But even with a bachelor's degree from the prestigious Pratt Institute in New York City, she found herself waiting tables.

Certainly graduate school would change that, she thought, so she went to Savannah College of Art and Design to study illustration.

"I wanted to get back into drawing and thought it would be a career," said Swearington, 33 and an Asheville resident. "But we were getting stupid assignments and I thought, I'm not paying all this money to not learn."

After scouring the school catalog and visiting different departments, she switched to fiber arts.

"I'd never heard of fibers, but I'd always liked patterns and fabrics. I'd made quilts and loved traditional quilts and how interesting they were optically and how sophisticated they could be."

After school, in 2000, she moved to Asheville.

"There I was, waiting tables again, with an MFA," she said.

Things started to turn around when she moved into clothes designing in 2003. Now, as a quilt and clothing maker, Swearington has turned in her waitress apron. In fact, she happily reported, "I just paid off my student loan. I paid it off doing what I love."

Fabric and fine art: "When I started with fibers at SCAD, it seemed to make sense because I could combine drawing and painting with fabric," she said. "I learned silk dying and surface design techniques in grad school and in Asheville had been selling some silk scarves on consignment. But scarves can get boring." During a yearlong residency program at Arrowmont School of Arts in Gatlinburg, Tenn., she assisted renowned fiber artist Ana Lisa Hedstrom, who was teaching techniques in fabric surface design.

Expanding inventory: With her application to the Southern Highland Craft Guild accepted in 2003, she prepared to sell work at their craft fair. "I can't just have scarves, I thought. Maybe I'll make a skirt or a dress." With her fabric training and through trial and error, Swearington made tailored clothing, "with darts and zippers. It would either fit or it wouldn't, and usually it didn't. Now I have none of that," she laughed. "I made a good amount of money at that show and I thought, wow, I can make a living at this."

Do and dye: Swearington makes all her clothes from white silk first, then dyes them. "I have little one-gallon buckets, so I'll dip them like Easter eggs to get a base color," she said. "I keep a sketchbook and love to draw and take drawings from sketchbook that I'll make into screens to put on the silk. To get images on silk, I screen print with a color-removal paste where I want drawings to be." All her items are preshrunk, dye-set and hand-washable. The key to her clothes fitting many shapes and sizes is her material. "I used silk with 8 percent Lycra. It's the greatest fabric ever."

Fashioning a look: Despite creating "wearable art," Swearington said she is no fashion maven. "I don't consider myself a fashion person at all. I don't even look at fashion magazines. I hate shopping." Still, her fashion sense has matured. "Things have gotten more detailed, from something being simple to more bells and whistles. Ruffles in collars, mixing fabrics and textures, contrasting sleeves, decorative stitching. They have a lot more flair."

Wearing it well: Younger women especially are drawn to Swearington's work. "In the craft fair or art-to-wear world a lot of what you see is baggy," she said. "I'm the only one I know of doing fitted things for a younger crowd. I do stuff I would wear, but also things that would fit a broad range. So much is about attitude. It's funny dealing with women and body image. It's really individual. Sometimes people say, 'You're young and thin, and I'm too old and fat to wear your clothes.' I think if they were open to it, I could put them in something, and they'd say, 'Oh wow, this looks nice.' I think some wearable art can be overwhelming. I don't really consider what I do art-to-wear. I consider it really cool clothes that you wear, that don't wear you."

About those quilts: Swearington concedes that her success in the fashion world has taken time away from her quilt paintings, her apt name for the fanciful illustrations in fabric. "I've been having a little identity question," she said. "Am I an artist or a designer? How much do I want the business to grow?" To jump-start her quilting, she took Carolina Designer Craftsmen's "masterwork" challenge for this year's show, where artists are encouraged to stretch their abilities. "I don't know if it's going to be that far off from what I've done in the past, but it's the biggest piece I've done. It's a triptych. I've really lamented my lack of time to make some fine art wall pieces that I really care about." Except to see evidence of her recent interest in ships and lighthouses, inspired by her reading "Ahab's Wife" and a lighthouse she and her husband kayaked to off the coast of Georgia last summer. "I'm at a stage now where I can't quite tell what will happen with it," she said in late October, "but it will happen."

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