The stitch is back - Number of crafters grows

Lisa Ferguson

Thursday, Jan. 30, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

These days, a stitch in time saves more than nine. It can also salvage your sanity.

According to a clinical study commissioned last year by the New York-based American Home Sewing and Craft Association, the soothing qualities of sewing can help reduce stress by lowering the heart rate, blood pressure and perspiration.

The study, designed by a New York psychologist, monitored 30 women -- 15 experienced sewers and 15 novices -- before and after they participated in five home leisure activities requiring hand-eye coordination, including reading, playing cards and sewing.

The biofeedback results, which were reported in the Journal of American Medicine, indicated that sewing proved the most relaxing activity. After stitching a small project, the heart rates of the experienced sewers dropped by 11 beats per minute.

"That's pretty good news for us, especially with stress being such a big issue with women today," says Beth Maurow, director of communications for AHSCA, which will hold its annual convention in Las Vegas in March.

"Sewing has taken a bad rap over the years because it's perceived as being an outdated activity, and it is not."

What it is is a $3.5 billion-a-year industry -- and growing.

In recent years, sewing and other home crafts have seen a resurgence in popularity and attracted a following much younger than the blue-haired grannies usually associated with homemade knickknackery.

Career-minded baby boomers are putting down their pagers and picking up up paint brushes, stencils and knitting needles as an escape from all things electronic.

"We're (living in) a very highly technological age. ... We're using all kinds of technology to do the steps of all the things we used to do by hand," Maurow explains.

"The people who are participating in sewing activities are really into the creativity. They're able to totally focus on sewing, ... and the result is a beautiful item."

The result is important to Dr. Carolyn McKelvie of Las Vegas -- mostly because, in her line of work, she rarely sees one.

"I do a lot and, sure, I've got the faith somewhere that ... at the end of the day, I made a difference in someone's life. But I have nothing to show for it," the 39-year-old family practitioner says.

That's why McKelvie took up quilting three years ago. "So I can come home and work with something that's in my hands, and when I'm done I can say, 'I created this.' I can't say that about my work."

Quilting, she says, "is my therapy. I tell my husband that fabric is cheaper than a psychiatrist."

The doctor is a member of the Desert Quilters of Nevada group and has completed about 10 of her "different" quilts (she adorned one with designs of ancient petroglyphs), which could be called fabric art.

The part McKelvie doesn't enjoy is sewing all of the fabric pieces together. "That's kind of like doing the paperwork at the end of a patient's visit. Doing the paperwork is no fun," she says.

"I think anybody that (is in) this kind of work, it's really essential to their emotional well-being to have a (creative) outlet where you do see something solid and they can express themselves."

McKelvie is among the countless boomers who grew up watching their grandmothers and mothers effortlessly embroider pansies onto pillowcases, knit cozy afghans and sew complete outfits in a snap.

But, outside of squirting some paint and sprinkling a few rhinestones on a T-shirt, the generation hasn't really had a handicraft to call their own.

"There's the whole aspect of home and hearth that's important to people," Maurow says. "Young professionals and first-time parents are responding because they're decorating their homes and they're making clothes for their children."

That's how Kathy Farris got started nearly 25 years ago, by making a quilt and "little outfits" for her newborn daughter.

Then she took up cake decorating and watercolors. "It just snowballed," she says.

Quilting, however, has become the school-bus driver's passion. Also a Desert Quilters member, Farris, 45, has been known to bring projects to work with her, needling away at them between stops.

"I would take projects that I knew could relax me and keep me alert at the same time," she says.

It also helped break the ice with her passengers.

"I've got 84 kids getting on, going, 'My grandma knows how to do that,'" she says. "All of a sudden, you've got an in with them, something else to talk about. You become a human being instead of an object behind the wheel."

Farris recently took up tole painting, a wildly popular style famous for its down-home appeal.

"Everybody asks, 'When do you have time to do all this stuff.' It's just a little bit at a time," Farris says. "You're literally watching something grow, that's how I look at it."

Knitting is another lost art that's been rediscovered after a steep decline in popularity during the '70s and '80s.

"It kind of snuck up on us," admits Carol Wiggington, founder of the Knitting Guild of America, headquartered in Knoxville, Tenn.

"We've started seeing lots of young faces ... all of these young lawyers" at regional conferences of the guild's 200 national chapters. "It's really been interesting," she says.

Wiggington also touts knitting's stress-reducing appeal.

Today's yarn quality, fibers and textures are "incredible," she says. "When those fibers run through your hands, you feel the stress flowing right out of you."

And it couldn't be easier to learn. "There are just two stitches (used) and you could probably learn it from a book," she says.

Not Janet Espeleta. She learned to knit at age 12 with the help of a girlfriend's father.

"He gave me a huge pair of wooden knitting needles," the former legal assistant recalls. Her first project was a burnt-orange sweater.

"It went on from there," Espeleta says. She's also dabbled with "every sort of needlework known to man," including cross-stitch. "That was a very, very big part of my life for a long time.

"One thing I wish I knew how to do was paint," she says. "I've had people think that my cross-stitch (works were) paintings."

A few years back, Espeleta was also bit by the quilting bug.

"And I've never looked back," she says. "The problem is that I only have two hands. Quilting has gotten so addictive that I don't do my cross-stitch as much."

Or anything else. The mother of four devotes at least two hours a day to quilting and usually completes one "small" project each month.

"The floors don't always get mopped, the beds don't always get made and the food doesn't always get cooked, but the quilting gets done. It gives me a lot of satisfaction in my soul."

On top of Espeleta's to-do list: Create a quilt that incorporates her cross-stitch talents.

"I told my mother, 'I should have been born with four extra arms, so I could crochet, knit, cross-stitch and quilt at the same time,'" she says.

It'd make her life sew much easier.