Carol Sauvion

In the field of American crafts, Carol Sauvion has just about done it all. A former studio potter and teacher with a college degree in art history, Sauvion opened her L.A. crafts shop, Freehand, in 1980. The 3rd Street emporium expanded into two adjacent storefronts as it became a popular outlet for functional works of clay, glass, wood, fiber and metal and a destination for believers in the power and beauty of the handmade. With a loyal clientele, it specializes in relatively timeless ceramics and jewelry rather than following trends.

In the field of American crafts, Carol Sauvion has just about done it all. A former studio potter and teacher with a college degree in art history, Sauvion opened her L.A. crafts shop, Freehand, in 1980. The 3rd Street emporium expanded into two adjacent storefronts as it became a popular outlet for functional works of clay, glass, wood, fiber and metal and a destination for believers in the power and beauty of the handmade. With a loyal clientele, it specializes in relatively timeless ceramics and jewelry rather than following trends.

You can grasp Carol Sauvion's story in a piece of clay. Make it mountains of clay, and add acres of weavings and galaxies of jewelry and bins of walking sticks and shelves of wooden spoons and platters of glass and armloads of silken scarves, and that's Sauvion's too, the story of things made by hand to please the eye. It's a story that began to take rough shape in the 1960s, when Sauvion lived in New York in the vortex of the country's folk and pop music scene. She was a potter.

You can grasp Carol Sauvion's story in a piece of clay. Make it mountains of clay, and add acres of weavings and galaxies of jewelry and bins of walking sticks and shelves of wooden spoons and platters of glass and armloads of silken scarves, and that's Sauvion's too, the story of things made by hand to please the eye. It's a story that began to take rough shape in the 1960s, when Sauvion lived in New York in the vortex of the country's folk and pop music scene. She was a potter.

Making a living producing one-of-a-kind, handmade crafts can be frustrating. You're not always considered a fine artist, and many people associate the work with macrame plant holders that went out with granny gowns. And yet, there's a thriving crafts movement here and abroad. The L.A. gallery/store Freehand is hosting a collection of pieces by 10 contemporary British applied artists.

A three-part program on the art of craft -- the furniture makers, potters, quilters and others who have charted American culture with their hands -- is scheduled to air at 8 p.m. Wednesday on PBS. "Craft in America" consists of three hour-long shows looking at pioneers in various fields, artists' connection to the environment and the spiritual and community links that result from their work.

A great deal has changed on West 3rd Street near the Beverly Center since Carol Sauvion opened her arts and craft store, Freehand, there 10 years ago. What were secondhand furniture stores are now antique stores and the tailor shops have given way to trendy clothing emporiums. Even Sauvion's store has changed with the times. It has doubled in size and now competes with tony gift shops by offering a bridal registry, a corporate gift service and custom orders.

As part of this year's programming theme, Music of and About the Americas, the 55th annual Ojai Music Festival, May 30 to June 3, will host an all-day symposium titled "The New Musical Immigrants: A U.S./Latin-American Dialogue," bringing together musicians, conductors, music scholars and management executives for series of talks and panels.

LIKE much of the painstaking handiwork highlighted in the PBS documentary series "Craft in America: Memory, Landscape, Community," creator Carol Sauvion says that crafting the three-episode series -- airing consecutively Wednesdays from 8 to 11 p.m. -- called for infinite patience. Sauvion, co-executive producer of the series with Kyra Thompson, says that the L.A.

Crystal may wink at you from across the room, but sometimes the stylish host or hostess wants something with a bit more pizazz. These days, fashionably dressed dinner tables are aglitter with handblown colored glassware designed in a medley of shapes and patterns. "Colored glasses are like jewelry for the table," says Steven Reissman, owner of the Tesoro Collection in Los Angeles, a store specializing in decorative accessories.

It's Sunday morning, and David Hrobowski is rearranging the breakfast pastries in a corner of MorYork Gallery in Highland Park. "Even this has to be just so," he says, shifting a banana that serves as the dividing line between slices of pumpkin and zucchini bread. "It's like my popsicle stuff." The "popsicle stuff" in question are frozen dessert sticks, thousands of them, glued together one by one to construct spiraling 3-foot-tall table legs and lampshades finished in the most improbable fringe.

A UCLA astronomer who is pioneering ways to minimize image distortion caused by the Earth's atmosphere and a Caltech physicist developing quantum computing are among the 25 winners of the 2008 MacArthur awards announced today. The winners, cited for "exceptional creativity" in their fields, will receive $500,000 each over the next five years to use as they see fit.