Art Project Sailing Along : Spectacle: Sail-making firm is producing 1,700 giant umbrellas as part of a project for the artist Christo, who thinks big and brashly.

For years, North Sails, the world’s largest sail maker, has sewn sails for kings, millionaires and yachtsmen. But, until recently, it had never stitched umbrellas.

Today, gigantic yellow umbrella tops are scattered everywhere in the San Diego sail-maker’s loft, heaped in piles, tossed under tables, folded into boxes. An assembly line of sewing machines seems to be spitting out umbrellas as fast as a slot machine does coins.

Sewing all these umbrella covers might earn the sail maker an asterisk in the annals of modern art.

For the umbrellas are being made for Christo, the New York artist, who’s got deep pockets, a vivid imagination and a fondness for using nature as a backdrop for his art. In October, he will unveil his latest vision along a stretch of no-man’s-land between Los Angeles and Bakersfield.

More than 1,700 umbrellas--each weighing 450 pounds--will dot a 18-mile stretch of parched hills that usually belong to cattle and tumbleweed. Fitting in nicely with local custom, Southern Californians, if they choose, won’t have to leave their cars to watch the show. It will all be visible from Interstate 5.

On the same day, 1,340 blue umbrellas will unfold in rice paddies, riverbed, a bamboo forest and villages in rural Japan.

Christo calls this $26-million project, which he will pay for himself, a “gentle disturbance.” Isn’t this irrational? Some have asked. Why, yes, Christo responds with glee. His art, he observes, “is monumental because it is only irrational and completely irresponsible.”

Millions have already gotten a glimpse of his past irrationality. After quite a bit of cajoling, Christo received permission to surround the tiny islands in the Biscayne Bay with flamingo pink polypropylene and shrouded the oldest bridge in Paris with Champagne-colored fabric. He also fulfilled his dream to stretch a cloth fence across pastureland in Northern California until it dipped into the Pacific Ocean.

The folks at North Sails are grateful that Christo’s visions are so ambitious.

“You can get pretty philosophical about how this money is spent on an art project, but, if nothing else, it’s provided a lot of jobs,” said Whitney Gladstone, who is supervising the umbrella project at the loft. He stood on the roof, where the metal frame of one umbrella--the base, the pole the ribs--were hoisted

months ago. From here it looks like the sail makers’ loft is hemmed in by a giant pincushion--actually the pointy masts of hundreds of yachts moored in the bay.

Christo sought out North Sails to make what he considers the most important part of his umbrellas--the canopy. A world-class yachtsman founded the company in San Diego in 1958. Since then, it has expanded to 50 locations around the world and was bought in the early 1980s by a family connected to the Kohler plumbing-fixture empire.

“We were told by quite a few friends who have sailboats that North Sails is the best in the world, so we went to them,” said Jeanne-Claude Christo, the artist’s wife and financial wizard.

But it was not a slam-dunk deal. It took almost a year of trying before Christo selected one of North Sails’ prototypes.

“For me personally, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” said Hal Walcoff, a North Sails executive at the Connecticut headquarters, who has designed sails for Olympic yachting crews.

Christo was exacting in what he wanted. When North Sails mailed the artist photographs of its latest attempt, he would scribble comment and sketches on the pictures and return them.

One finally caught his eye. The umbrella top was shipped from San Diego to Connecticut for a preview. As Gladstone recalls, Walcoff thought the prototype was a disaster.

“Walcoff put it up and said, ‘Oh, it’s going to look like hell!’ But he couldn’t do anything to it--the Christos’ were arriving in an hour,” Gladstone said.

The Christos, however, loved it.

North Sails officials quickly discovered that their loft wasn’t designed to mass-produce 40-pound umbrella covers. Space wasn’t the problem. Inside, there is enough room for the San Diego Chargers to practice. It was the scuffed whitewashed floors that posed a problem. The plank floors were made of unusually soft wood--soft enough to secure ice picks that anchor sails during the sail-making process.

The sail makers shuddered when they envisioned wheeling the 1,000-pound bolts of yellow and blue cloth inside.

“We couldn’t bring the fabric into the building--it would weigh too much,” Gladstone said. “You’d hear the floor crunching.”

The solution required knocking down several walls and eliminating a couple of offices. In their place, a garage door was hung so the bolts of fabric could remain outdoors. The material is pulled across the huge cutting table as needed. In usually dry California, nobody was too worried that the fabric would get wet. But a makeshift roof was erected just in case.

The umbrella factory hums 16 hours a day--producing 100 umbrella tops a week. The deadline for the $900,000 job is August.

Every week a truck hauls the umbrellas to a secret location in Bakersfield, where they are being assembled by employees of an international irrigation company.

It’s hard to generalize about the 26 folks recruited to cut and sew through roughly 200,000 pounds of slippery nylon. A few newly discharged sailors signed on. So did an out-of-work Chinese history professor, a kite maker, a wedding dress seamstress, a welder and a former tire salesman who got fed up listening to people gripe about nails and flats. One guy lasted just three days after he declined to work anywhere but under a plywood table. His colleagues drew an outline of a chair where he had sat and labeled it “King Richard’s throne.”

Larry Blodgett, a graduate from the Chicago Art Institute, is one of the few on the payroll who had actually heard of Christo. Blodgett, who paints nudes and imitation Monets, signed on after a job painting a replica of the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling in someone’s house fell through.

Blodgett, who looks much like a surfer, usually operates the laser cutter, which he decorated with a postcard of a busty brunette sunbather.

“Atmosphere,” he explained sheepishly, as the tiny laser beam slid across the table, slicing the yellow fabric.”

The laser machine, which is thought to be the widest in the world, was built from scratch at North Sails. Sucking up energy like a thirsty marathon runner, it has blown several fuses and done strange things to the old building’s “funky” wiring.

Working with the high-tech laser isn’t complicated, but it does require a sturdy pair of kneepads. That’s because the West German fabric that the laser cuts, or rather melts, is incredibly stretchy. Pick up a piece of newly cut fabric, and it will grow 6 inches. To prevent this, somebody must crawl along the table, retracing the laser’s path, to strengthen the fabric’s edges with tape.

Each umbrella requires eight triangular panels. At various stages, the 3,100 umbrellas are taped, sewn and taped again.

It’s a repetitive job that one Christo worker calls “about as exciting as standing in line at a bank.”

It’s especially hard for the blue-collar refugees who can’t get worked up over the artistic drive of a guy from Soho. Most of them snip and stitch in a corner of the building that one colleague laughingly calls “the pig pen.” A welder with a kung-fu mustache and biceps that display a gallery of tattoo art, lets slip what he calls the artist: “Crisco.”

The guys kill time by trying to bore the pants off each other.

“Hey did I tell you I’m going to Big Bear tomorrow?” Russ Heskett, a mechanic asked his chums for the hundredth time on a recent Friday afternoon.

“Oh really,” they replied.

A couple minutes later, Heskett piped up. “I’m heading to Big Bear tomorrow.”

“So you’re going to Big Bear,” the chorus chimed in.

And on and on it went until quitting time.

The monotony can get pretty bad, Gladstone acknowledged.

“I sympathize,” he said. “I’ve had people come up and say I just can’t do it. I say fine. Thanks for doing what you could.”

But boredom is relative. Marcia Carver, who until last year was a mortgage banker, thinks sewing Christo’s umbrellas is a great life. Being desk-bound, Carver remembers “was soooo boring, nothing could be more boring than that.”

At work, you have to shout at Carver to catch her attention. Like a lot of people here, the 32-year-old wears a Walkman. The rest of her uniform is baggy pants, a sleeveless T-shirt and tan shoes imprinted with ballerinas.

On a recent day she was folding endless reams of tape. Other times she works in the mezzanine, where the rattle of industrial sewing machines requires dial adjustment on the Walkman.

“I like to belong to causes that will have history behind them,” said Carver, a member of the Ocean Beach Town Council.

“I guess I want to leave my mark before I die.”