Sewing Up a Career Keeps Her in Stitches

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.

Thus is the stuff of artistry, it seems.

Today, 40-year-old Claypool sews professionally. Not dresses or aprons or doll clothes. She sews paintings by kids.

“I have a foster daughter, and I needed something for the walls in her bedroom. She had drawn a couple of little ladies, and I was trying to figure out how to enlarge them for her wall,” Claypool said.

Then, one afternoon during a nap to soothe a headache--caused, no doubt, by sewing--she had a dream. She woke up and went on a 7 a.m.-to-midnight sewing binge for five days to test her vision. It worked. And, thus, Sentimental Stitches was created.

Her dream-come-true:

She transforms children’s paintings into machine embroidery and applique, by freehand drawing a child’s work of art onto an 18- by 24-inch piece of canvas material. Then, cutting out tiny pieces of appropriate-color material from her piles of scraps, she re-creates the drawing in fabric and stitching.

Her work has been displayed twice at Neiman-Marcus in Fashion Valley, at the Carlsbad Library and in private schools, where parents have commissioned her to memorialize their little darlings’ crayon and magic marker creations into fabric works, appropriate for hanging.

“Kids go crazy when they see how it turns out,” she said. “They say, ‘Hey, that’s my drawing!’ But it won’t turn yellow or deteriorate. And it gives it a new dimension, a vibrancy.”

She’s done several hundred fabric copies of children’s paintings, ranging from drawings of Transformers to family portraits to rainbows upon rainbows, to fashion models.

Then there was the picture of a Thanksgiving dinner. “I had to cut out tiny little pieces of scrap for the checkerboard tablecloth. The child had awful perspective, with tiny heads sticking up around this huge table, with one eye up here, one eye down there, and a smile that wraps around. It was totally dorky, but she loved it.”

And now a faithful, fabric replica of the painting hangs in the girl’s house, and she’ll probably never realize that it is a Connie Claypool dress that didn’t turn out.

“I love doing this because I can be an imperfectionist and still sew a child’s drawing,” she said. “But you’ll still never get me near a dress pattern.”

Thanks a Million!

The three Sea Worlds--ours, the one in Orlando and the one in Cleveland--are getting ready to celebrate their combined 100 millionth visitor--the one they figure will enter one of the three parks Aug. 27.

Because park officials won’t be able to actually count the right one, each park will arbitrarily pick a time of day and--Ta-da!-- bestow the honors on three separate families.

Honors? “A hug from Shamu, a tour of the park, a pass to Sea World, lunch, and we’re still trying to figure out a nice commemorative gift,” said Sea World spokeswoman Jackie Hill.

Like, a whaleskin slicker if you sit in the first 10 rows of Shamu Stadium.

Whole Lotto Nothin’

The California Lottery folks are out selling their newest game, Lotto 6/49, and dispatched a road show to local shopping malls to explain to passers-by just how easy it is to play.

The demo may be doing more harm than good.

At the Escondido Village Mall on Friday, shoppers moseyed up to a nifty booth manned by two articulate fellas, who invited them to play 10 lotto games for fun.

The game is a lotto like keno. Pick six numbers out of 49. If three of your six numbers come up, you get $5. If you get four or five out of six, you get substantially larger winnings, based on the millions of bucks pitched into the weekly kitty statewide. If you hit six out of six, you can buy the yacht and pay back Uncle Charlie.

For the freebie shopping mall demonstration, the 3-out-of-6 winners get a sun visor, and the jackpot winners get a $1,000 gift certificate.

Rose Hove was playing her fourth or fifth set of 10 freebie games, and had four visors and a polo shirt in winnings to show for herself. “It’s easy to get hooked when it’s free,” she said.

So the game was played. Out of more than 30 players--and more than 300 chances for winners--the game only produced four winners. Four out of 300. Hmmm. “We gotta have more winners than this,” the Lottery salesman sighed into his open microphone.

Off to the side, a woman muttered, “I’ll keep my money in T-bills.”

Aloha, Club Med

They’re planning a grand send-off at UC San Diego for Dr. Robert G. Petersdorf, vice chancellor for health sciences and the dean of the School of Medicine. He’s leaving to become president of the prestigious Assn. of American Medical Colleges in Washington.

So, according to the printed invitations, he’ll be honored Aug. 27 at Club Med. Well, not the Club Med. This is the school of medicine’s cafeteria.