Sewing

As retirement crept up on Francine Landau, she knew she would need a hobby to fill all the hours she once spent as an engineer at Hughes Aircraft. When friend and co-worker Hazel Wetts suggested she give quilting a try she had to stifle a laugh. "I had never sewn a thing in my life, but I knew I needed something to make the transition into retirement," Landau said. "Now I'm an addict. I even tried to go back and do some consulting, but I found it got in the way of my quilting!"

In the old days, worlds collided. Artists slammed incompatible realities together, pitting high against low, painting against screen printing, and functionalism against art for art's sake. Today, that's impossible because the borders between art and design, as well as craft, entertainment, recreation, activism, and leisure have blurred beyond recognition. Worlds do not collide so much as they overlap, intermingle, cross-pollinate. At Various Small Fires, Anna Sew Hoy lets contemporary art and boutique couture segue into each other, often creating intriguing hybrids that are both approachable and alien, their nothing-specialness abuzz with a subtle charge of strangeness.

FINALLY, The Times gave voice to the secret lives of sewing buddies ["Cut From the Same Cloth," June 7]. I don't know the author, Kitty Felde, but I immediately loved her for exposing sewing for what it is -- a wonderful pastime, bonding activity and lost art. To me, a day engrossed in my fabrics and patterns has always been a gift I give myself. Sew on, sister! CONNIE MERRITT HUGHES Laguna Beach CONGRATULATIONS on the revealing and moving article by Felde on her sewing experience with her longtime close friend.

Haptic Lab, the design studio known for creating intricately detailed "soft maps" -- quilted renderings of cities and neighborhoods -- has released a do-it-yourself quilt kit so that you can create the look yourself. The $38 DIY kit includes a single-use template so experienced sewers can create their own 36-by-42-inch map of the United States. The kit also includes sewing instructions and a material list to bring to your local quilt shop or fabric store. Fabric, batting and thread are not included.  Haptic Lab's finished keepsakes normally range from $145 for a baby quilt to $450 for a larger size that the company says fits full to king-size beds; custom pieces are priced as high as $1,200.

PSST. Want to learn how to sew together a T-shirt, make soymilk from scratch or create direct animation from a filmstrip? Creative types who want to get their hands dirty can learn the basics in various clinics, collaborations and celebrations, and Toyota will foot the bill. Ten workshops will be presented over five days during the Los Angeles segment of Toyota's YarisWorks tour, kicking off Wednesday.

Instead of forking over hundreds of dollars for the same Bohemian-inspired jeans and thong sandals everyone else is wearing, why not make your own? With a few fabric remnants, some inexpensive trim and a little creativity, you can update a pair of old jeans and make plain sandals trendy for the summer. Handmade fashions have become a major trend, and according to the Home Sewing Assn., a number of fashion-forward people are creating their own designer looks, often at significant savings.

Volunteers associated with Valley Presbyterian Hospital are making coats for low-income youngsters to wear this winter at about one-tenth the cost of a new jacket. Not only are the coats inexpensive to make, but they require no pattern, just a sewing machine. Meyling Eliash-Daneshfar, the hospital's marketing and public relations coordinator, discovered on the Internet a simple diagram for making a jacket from two-thirds of a yard of fabric.

Connie Claypool of Vista absolutely hates to sew because she never gets it right. She'll buy a dress pattern but is lousy at following critical directions, so she'll mess it all up and get discouraged. She's got tons of almost-dresses in a trunk, serving as little more than scrap material that she just couldn't bring herself to throw away. And her machine? She tugs and pulls and yanks on the material so hard that the fellow who fixes her sewing machine says he can no longer adjust it. He shrugs.

Buying retail can be costly. Perhaps that's why people make their own clothing, sometimes saving as much as 50% on a garment. Understandably, making a garment does take time and talent.

The wives of the U.S. Navy cruiser Princeton, which encountered an "influence mine" in the northern Persian Gulf and became the only U.S. ship put out of action in the war, are fashioning a huge purple heart to send to the crew of 420. They also are beginning to think about a huge homecoming celebration.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - For a Soweto boy, he had a lot of sneakers. He remembers the joy of that first pair. They had to be red. Walking out of the shop carrying a cardboard box with the sneakers, Sifiso Dlamini, at 12, took the first steps on a long journey in search of the soul of a shoe. "Having a pair of sneakers in Soweto meant a lot. You were cool and every kid on the block wanted to have their pair of sneakers. "I had a lot, because I was obsessed" - a dozen pairs, more than anyone he knew in the township.

EVENTS The 31st biannual Pomona Quilt, Craft & Sewing Festival returns to the Pomona Fairplex. Over the course of three days, novices and experts alike will find plenty to outfit their projects from more than 60 sewing, quilting, needle-art and crafts exhibitor booths (offering wares by local and national companies), exhibitor seminars and an array of "Make and Take" workshops, among them, no-sew quilted wall hangings, easy stained glass and beading projects for all skill levels.

When Anna Sew Hoy moved into the Highland Park bungalow she shares with her husband in fall 2008, she brought her studio — formerly housed in the Women's Building on Spring Street — with her. Rather than landing in a garage or sectioned off back room, however, it gradually spidered out across the property. "It's decentralized," she says. "I have a studio there," she points to the front bedroom, "where I make things, and then I have a dirty place in the back, a wood shop, and then I have a room over there that's white, where I just look at stuff.

    In the 1970s, artists such as Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago reclaimed crafts such as sewing, weaving and quilting and used them to create new and often politicized work. At the time, it was a radical gesture; today, these techniques have been absorbed into the artist's toolbox, as we see in "Stitches," a group show at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena through June 6.      "I've always had a fascination with process and material-based work," says  curator Sinéad Finnerty-Pyne.

Jeanie Joe is scrambling to keep her South Pasadena sewing shop humming while juggling on-site sewing classes and designing the eclectic handbags she sells in the sunny store. She knows that Sew Joe Stitch Lounge needs to hire its first employee, but she's worried that she'll be tied up with payroll paperwork and time-draining training. "I don't want to become just a supervisor," said Joe, 56, who opened the Mission Street store two years ago after quitting her longtime career as a bartender.

They gather every day in a tiny former dry goods shop on a residential street here in this West African capital, and to the neighbors they are what they seem: seven women in front of sewing machines learning to make brightly colored dresses, dashikis and slippers. But the women share a secret. "It's a very long story," said one of them, Christiana John, a tired look on her face. "I don't like to remember most of the things that happened to me." Among the many victims of Sierra Leone's brutal, decade-long civil war are the "bush wives," the girls and women who were kidnapped, raped and forced to "marry" combatants and bear their children.

Celia Morrissette is one woman who truly has it made. Employed by Vogue/Butterick Patterns to keep home sewing alive in America, she makes store appearances wearing clothes made by 12 company seamstresses. The only drawbacks, from an outsider's point of view, are the labels. They have the pattern number printed in ball-point pen on them, bringing to mind the inside of a military uniform. But Morrissette isn't complaining. Dressed in an Anne Klein suit, Vogue Pattern 2067, she explained: "It's a big help having the number there.

Marco Rodriguez isn't your typical baseball fan. In fact, he isn't much of a fan at all. Futbol is his game. It's almost everybody's game in this pastoral village. They kick the ball around in the streets and in dirt fields, even on the concrete basketball court that seems so out of place in the community park. If there were a baseball diamond here, well, doubleheaders would still merely be a means of moving the soccer ball down field.

They'd better both be dead. "Grey's Anatomy" limped to its season finale Thursday with a two-hour episode as we all waited in less-than-breathless anticipation to see if the endless and increasingly monotonous rumors were true and both T.R. Knight (who plays George O'Malley) and Katherine Heigl (Izzie Stevens) were leaving the show.

Just 19, Jessica Dooley opened a boutique in Burbank last month called the Sewing Lounge. "I want to create a community of crafters who encourage one another," she said from her sunny space. A recent graduate of the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising's marketing program, Dooley hosts daily "open sewing" hours when customers can drop in and use the machines. She also leads classes.