Sewing

Fledgling fashionistas can learn the sewing and design basics, or hone their skills, at fashion-centered summer camps. Orange Coast College is hosting three camps for kids ranging from 9 to 15 years old with beginning to intermediate sewing skills. Camps are from 9:30 a.m. to noon Monday through Thursday starting with Summer T-shirt, July 11 to 14; Rags to Riches, July 18 to 21; and Pretty in Pajamas, July 25 to 28. Each camp is $99 plus a $15 materials fee. To register call (714)

Jeff Benson Scissors snip and sewing machines surge around the clock. Every night, the inside of Nancy Ervin's Newport Beach home looks and sounds more like a textile factory. But it's not an army of seamstresses haphazardly dropping loads of scraps on the floor and creating a ruckus, carrying on until midnight. There's simply work to be done for Ervin's daughter, Nicole, and her daughter's friend, Megan Toman. In July, the 15-year-old incoming Newport Harbor High School sophomores discovered how much fun sewing could be. Now, the two self-employed volunteers are only six blankets short of their goal of 20, which they will personally deliver to a children's organization, Nicole said.

Sewing enthusiasts can get the best tips on sewing, quilting and needle-arts at the fourth annual Orange County Craft and Sewing Festival from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. It's in building 10 at the Orange County Fairgrounds. The festival will feature tons of supplies, notions, patterns and techniques for sewing, quilting, needle-arts, tole painting, rubber stamping, embossing, fabric crafts and more. A lot of the booths will have never-before-seen products.

It makes sense that the other name for a blanket would be “comforter.” Picture the famous Peanuts character Linus, thumb in mouth, clutching his blankie as it draped along the floor. Children love their blankets, but as Joy Horrocks discovered several years ago, so do adults. Especially sick adults. Horrocks’ daughter had been diagnosed with a blood disorder. Sandy Berg Whiley was undergoing treatment at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian. The hospital room was cold, the chemicals flowing through her veins lowered her body temperature, and Whiley was freezing.

Emily Jane Barker, a 1997 graduate of Newport Harbor High School, recently launched her own fashion line, Emily Jane Clothing, which debuted at San Francisco’s Fashion Week in August. A tennis star at Newport Harbor, Barker went to Boise State on a tennis scholarship, then returned home and went on to San Francisco’s Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising to pursue her interest in clothing design. Growing up in Newport Beach, Barker “learned how to spin wool on her great aunt’s spinning wheel and make her first pieces on her grandmother’s sewing machine, using her two sisters as mannequins,” according to Barker’s website.

AG Adriano Goldschmied, a denim retailer headquartered in South Gate, plans to open its first Orange County store today at South Coast Plaza. The retailer, which operates stores in Beverly Hills, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and elsewhere, offers fitting from professionally trained sales attendants and on-site custom tailoring on an 18-karat gold sewing machine, along with a coffee bar for people waiting for their jeans to be finished....

He spent much of his life devising ways to change our lives for the better. There was the hair straightener and the zig-zag stitching attachment for the sewing machine. There was the gas mask and one of his most significant inventions, the traffic signal. It was a way to prevent collisions created by all those bicycles, animal-powered wagons and new gasoline-powered motor vehicles that were sharing the same roads and streets in the early 1900s. The seventh of 11 children, born in 1877 to Sidney and Elizabeth Morgan in Paris, Ky., Garrett Augustus Morgan was a kid who showed aptitude and a man who never stopped striving for a better life.

He spent much of his life devising ways to change our lives for the better. There was the hair straightener and the zig-zag stitching attachment for the sewing machine. There was the gas mask and one of his most significant inventions, the traffic signal. It was a way to prevent collisions created by all those bicycles, animal-powered wagons and new gasoline-powered motor vehicles that were sharing the same roads and streets in the early 1900s. The seventh of 11 children, born in 1877 to Sidney and Elizabeth Morgan in Paris, Ky., Garrett Augustus Morgan was a kid who showed aptitude and a man who never stopped striving for a better life.

Hannah MacLeod is having a difficult time trying to choose between her two loves, fashion designing and soccer. She?s got time ? she?s only a sophomore. But already, the Sage Hill School goalkeeper is trying her best to find a way to follow the directive of Tim Gunn, the erudite host of Bravo?s ?Project Runway.? MacLeod is trying to ?make it work.? When she?s not donning cleats and spitting in her gloves (it makes them stickier), MacLeod is comfortable sitting behind a sewing machine, or draping fabric over a mannequin as she holds pins in her mouth.

Connie Johnston has lived in the Costa Mesa area since 1969, when she packed up her broken-down Lincoln with her five children and left her husband to start a new life on the West Coast. The 79-year-old has worked hard to raise her children on her own, and even now that they're all grown up, she can't seem to slow down and accept the life of a retiree. Johnston is always out in the community, whether it's catering Thanksgiving dinner for 65 or just listening to people who need a friendly ear. She spends a lot of her time as a volunteer leader for a widows and widowers support group at the Costa Mesa Senior Center.

In a second-story room off Adams Avenue, they stitched and talked. Then, after with a lunch break, they stitched and talked some more. For two years, that's exactly what these ladies have loved doing from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. every Monday and Friday at the Piecemakers Country Store in Costa Mesa. These Material Girls, as they've dubbed themselves, make quilts for themselves and for others. It's an old-fashioned sewing circle, quilting bee, home-away-from-home kind of situation.

Actress Lynn Milgrim will step onto the main stage at South Coast Repertory on Friday night as Mrs. Carrie Watts. To inhabit the role of the protagonist in Horton Foote's "A Trip to Bountiful," Milgrim will don an old-fashioned lavender cotton dress. The play is about a middle-aged Texas woman traveling on a bus in the 1950s in search of her hometown in the American heartland. "A Trip to Bountiful" is a work of fiction, but the dress has a true story to tell that the SCR production won't reveal to audiences as it previews throughout the week and officially opens on Oct. 28. To help the actress bring Foote's story to life, at least five pairs of female hands formed an assembly line that designed and made the dress under a tight deadline.

Fledgling fashionistas can learn the sewing and design basics, or hone their skills, at fashion-centered summer camps. Orange Coast College is hosting three camps for kids ranging from 9 to 15 years old with beginning to intermediate sewing skills. Camps are from 9:30 a.m. to noon Monday through Thursday starting with Summer T-shirt, July 11 to 14; Rags to Riches, July 18 to 21; and Pretty in Pajamas, July 25 to 28. Each camp is $99 plus a $15 materials fee. To register call (714)

COSTA MESA — The classroom's doors were thrown open to let the sunlight in as the students sat at bare wooden desks, working with their hands. The weather was perfect as the students in the second-grade class knitted multi-colored wool into what would soon become gnomes. The second-grade class at the Waldorf School of Orange County, 2350 Canyon Drive, was practicing knitting skills Thursday afternoon in a bi-weekly handwork class. Second-grader Sebastian Khan was working intently on strands of orange, red and pink wool, which he intertwined with large wooden needles.

Last year, the Growlers pieced apart their recording studio in Westminster, packed it all into the backs of cars and headed for a nondescript office building on Costa Mesa’s Westside. The studio, which they dubbed the Ratlands — a popular 1960s counterculture name for the seedy side of Mexico — had taken more than one trip in the past. The band left its initial digs in Long Beach when the neighborhood grew too violent, then left Westminster when the property they had been renting went into foreclosure.