Super Seamstress-Author-Artist Plays Sewing Machine Like a Stradivarius

Dorothy Magnuson is an up-to-date woman who does her sewing on a $1,900 computerized sewing machine that can almost be programmed to cook, so to speak.

“You have to go with the times, you know,” explained the 66-year-old former preschool teacher from Orange, who said she sews every day and never puts the machine away. “I’m not about to sit around in a rocking chair and get old. I’m just a spring chicken.”

Magnuson has just published a joke book aptly named “Kept in Stitches,” and she already has sold 100 volumes at $4.50 each. Magnuson also drew the illustrations for the book.

“I guess that makes me an author and an artist,” she said.

But she added, “I really think only sewers will appreciate the joke book.”

Now, Magnuson is about to publish a sewing pattern book called “Paint, Trace and Save” for other computer sewing machine users.

For all her sewing, Magnuson, a grandmother, doesn’t make clothes any more. “I’m experimenting with the machine to see what it can do,” and that includes sewing scenes on fiber glass for screen doors, creating lively patterns on sweat shirts and outlining pictures with different-colored thread and framing the entire work, she said.

She also paints on fabric and surrounds it with machine-sewn trimmings.

The machine also can be programmed to cross-stitch, do needlepoint and embroider, as well as sew lace on any type of garment. “We used to do all that by hand. No more,” she said.

A director of the California Assn. of Machine Embroidery (CAME), Magnuson recently held a working seminar at Orange Coast College on “Elegant Battenberg Lace Techniques on the Sewing Machine.”

“In the old days, we sewed lace on clothing by hand, and that was really time-consuming,” she said. “Now, we can program the machine and can do the same thing, quick as a flash.”

Most of the people attending her seminars and classes are seniors trying to find new things to sew and new ways to do it, instead of just making clothes for their children. “Years ago, our income wasn’t where we could go out an buy things, so we made them,” she said.

But few women are sewing clothes for their children any more, she said.

“They don’t have the time because mothers these days are working and the kids don’t wear suits or dresses any more,” she said. “They’re wearing sloppy pants and sweat shirts and it’s cheaper to buy them than to make them.”

The women who do still sew, she said, are senior citizens.

“I really don’t know who’s going to be sewing in the days to come,” she said. “Mothers aren’t teaching their children how to sew anymore.”

It’s taken 75 years, but Fullerton College finally has an alumni association. It is the state’s oldest community college in continuous operation.

The group was formed as a highlight of the college’s year-round Diamond Jubilee celebration. Members named retired chemical and petroleum representative Kenneth L. Reynolds of Garden Grove as interim president. He was student body president in 1935.

The Fullerton Museum is seeking residents who lived in Orange County during the Long Beach earthquake in 1933, the San Fernando quake in 1971 and the 1988 Whittier temblor, to help formulate a major historical survey.

“We want to personalize the statistics from those quakes by interviewing people who lived in the county during those times,” said Lynn LaBate, spokeswoman for the project. “We want to find out how people felt and reacted during the shaking.”

The museum project will be a 3-part, multimedia exhibit that will include interviews, photographs and videotaping.

For information, call (714) 738-6545.

Santa Ana resident Pat Bacon is legally blind and had a nice way of commenting on her first-place finish over 14 others in the Braille Institute’s recent chili cook-off in Los Angeles.

Despite her vision difficulty, Bacon said she could always see her way around a pot of chili.

Bacon used a simple recipe to prepare the chili, but credited its good taste to the use of stewed tomatoes. All of the chili-cooking contestants were legally blind.