Growing up in Pensacola, Florida, Denise Sansing was taught by her mother Fran not only to appreciate fine things but also how to make them, and the legacy of that early training is the repertoire of distinctive and elegant designs Denise creates today for her own company, Sweet Dreams, Inc.

"My mom grew up without a father on a small farm in southern Alabama," the designer relates. "She worked alongside her mother in the cotton fields they rented out to sharecroppers in order to make a living. Wow! Now that's something to give a daughter inspiration to succeed!"

When Denise was young, her mother was well-known in Pensacola for the thousands of elaborate Mardi Gras-style costumes she created for the city's cotillions, fancy balls and parades. She would take Denise and her sister on outings to gather "wonderful fabrics, laces, feathers and spangles," recalls the designer. Even brass findings from the hardware bin would become decorations on some elaborate costume.

"My mom loves hardware stores," Sansing laughs. "She was always so open to new ideas - always seeing things not the way they were meant to be seen."

While what she made for others was elegant and sometimes extravagant, Fran Sansing carefully set a different example for her daughters.

"When I was growing up one didn't spend money frivolously," Sansing recalled. "My mom was getting all these magazines like Vogue and House and Garden, and we would see all these beautiful things that we couldn't go out and buy, so we just made them. It was just amazing the things we did. We sewed literally all our clothes; we upholstered our furniture; we made our draperies. We were foolish enough to think there was nothing we couldn't do."

That legacy has served Denise well as she and her partner Scott Beard have built Sweet Dreams into an industry leader in fine home accessories. The first pillows she created for the commercial market combined elegant laces, which she had lovingly collected while living and working in Europe, with antique dresser scarves and remnants of old fabric salvaged from the ropa usadas (or rag stores) of South Texas.

"Someone would throw away their grandmother's entire service of beautifully monogrammed place mats, napkins, pillow shams - everything. After we washed them, we would dye them pastel colors, then they were starched and ironed and finally turned into intricate patchwork pillows. That was our 'Monogram Series.' It was such an eccentric concept, incredibly laborious, but really appreciated by people who had a sense of history and knew old linens."

One of Denise's favorite recollections of those early days was a story related to her by Doris Sanders of Doris Sanders Ltd. at the World Trade Center in Dallas, who was the first to take a chance on the young designer.

Sanders tells of a group of women buyers coming into her showroom and seeing those early Denise Sansing designs for the first time. "They told her they thought they had found the rainbow," the designer recalls with astonishment.

Doris Sanders Ltd's owner, Sue Wyll, says that Denise Sansing is "truly the most creative designer in the industry. She sets the tone....Everyone is copying what she nurtured and cultivated."

And that view is shared by Doug McKoon, who owns showrooms in Atlanta and High Point. Calling Denise a "creative genius," he adds, "It's hard to believe that one person can create so much beauty....Denise's love of beautiful fabrics, her eye for color, her ability to create any style, her choices of trims, cords, braids, tassels, her exacting sewing skills, her sense of humor - all of these things combine to make her products unique."

McKoon also credits the experiences Scott and Denise have had as they traveled and lived in different parts of the world, including France, England, Israel and Africa, as being major influences on Sweet Dreams' line. "Visiting lots of different museums and meeting lots of different people had an affect on both of them, and especially on Denise's creativity," McKoon notes.

Denise likens her creations to the Victorian crazy quilt that was one of the company's first products. "The concept of incorporating all those different fabrics, putting on one's own decorative stitches like a little spider in the corner, along with the date - it's the personal documentation that gives value," she says.

"You just take things that you bump into as you go along in your life and you make it your own and you reinterpret is. I think that's how almost everything we've done has been done."