Sew much fun

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Nov 26, 2004 by Susan Whitney Deseret Morning News

When Dee Painter goes on vacation, she takes a sewing machine with her. Sometimes she takes two. After a long day of sightseeing, while her husband watches TV, she likes to relax in the motel room by doing some machine embroidery.

In this, she said, she is not unusual.

She knows several other women who take their sewing machines on vacation. She knows dozens who are as passionate about their craft as she is, dozens of people who have spent $5,000 on a machine and who will stay up half the night when they've got a new embroidery pattern on their machine's computer. Once you get started on a design, she explained, it is hard to wait until morning to see how it looks when it is "sewn out."

If you stop by Painter's home, in Sugar House, she'll show you what she and her machines can do. She'll pull out a half dozen T- shirts, in bright fabric with contrasting bright embroidery. She'll show you linens, vests, jackets, quilt squares. It may seem like a lot of items, and yet, she said, "almost everything I've made, I've given away."

If you, as a visitor, are new to machine embroidery, she'll let you choose a simple pattern, and she'll push a few buttons. The two of you will keep talking and forget all about the machine until it stops, eight minutes later.

You will exclaim over the pink butterfly, and Painter will look at you sadly. She's too polite to say, "Where have you been for the past 20 years that you didn't know how far sewing machines have come?"

Painter's passion for machine embroidery grew quite naturally. She was the child of a woman who was an accomplished tailor, and she started sewing when she was a girl. Painter sewed her own clothes and, later, her daughters' clothes.

As there were advancements in the industry, as computers started to cost less, and industrial machines became affordable for everyone, Painter found herself buying new machines and software. Like thousands of Utahns these days, when Painter talks about sewing, she talks about floppy discs and designs she has downloaded off the Internet.

She knows so much about the technology that she now sells the Ellago machines. For all her technical savvy, Painter is unusual in that she also still makes most of her own clothes.

You don't find many women who sew their own clothes anymore, notes Rhonda Lopez. Lopez owns the Bernina Nuttall store on 900 East in Holladay. She said that Utahns do sew wedding dresses and prom dresses. "And lots of children's clothes are still being sewn in Utah."

But few sew for themselves anymore, and no one does it to save money, not with inexpensive imported clothing filling the racks in stores in the United States.

At Lopez's store -- as at the Cotton Shop, where Painter works -- you can find simple sewing machines for $200. These machines are the kind that Utahns have used for generations. They go forward and backward and are fine for making Halloween costumes or any item of clothing, really. You have to pay more -- anywhere from $500 to $10,000 -- to get a computerized machine that does embroidery.

If you want to embroider, of course, you also need a palette of colored thread. You can find embroidery thread for as little as $3 a spool (on sale) or as much as $10 for the shimmery kind, the kind you absolutely have to have to do the fairies' wings on your granddaughter's dress.

People sometimes ask Lopez, "How do people justify spending this kind of money on sewing if they don't intend to make clothes?" Her answer is: You don't have to justify it. Machine embroidery doesn't cost any more than golf or snowmobiling or lots of other hobbies. Also, like a lot of other hobbies, sewing is a social hobby.

One Saturday a month, Painter leads an embroidery club at the Cotton Shop's Murray store. She stands before a small room, packed with about 50 women and talks about new patterns and possibilities. The women take turns showing what they've made -- elegant and ornate pillows, sweatshirts for the grandkids. They also do charity projects, such as colorful shirts for the kids at Primary Children's Medical Center and ornaments for the Festival of Trees.

Last month they surprised one of their club members with a quilt they'd made. Each member was given a square of fabric and some thread, and each came up with her own design and embroidered it. Then all the squares were gathered into a quilt, which they gave to a fellow embroiderer who has had several types of cancer.

At the club meeting, they also helped each other solve sewing questions. "How will this pattern work on dissolvable paper?" asked one woman. Another said, "People at work have asked me to make things for them, but what should I charge?" (Answer: a set-up fee and then $1 per 1,000 stitches.)

Painter sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking of a new pattern to create or finding a solution to a technical problem. There's nothing you can't do on these machines, she said. "You can take a photo of a child, scan it into the computer, embroider it on a shirt."