The Home Office : Self-employment: Flexible hours and the chance to be creative appeal to many women, although sometimes they must put up with lower incomes.

It’s 10:30 at night, and Alicia Tyson is sitting in her bow room designing headbands made from thrift-store jeans.

The home office--a large laundry room in Tyson’s estate-sized home in Agoura Hills--is covered with ribbons, silk flowers, sequins and every craft-store find imaginable. Tyson, 40, calls her business “Too Cute,” and designs and makes high-style hair bows and headbands that sell for $5 to $18 at local clothing stores. An ex-schoolteacher with a master’s degree in media technology, Tyson makes bows, she says, because it’s a creative way to earn money--$9,000 last year--and feel productive. And because so much of her work can be done any time of the day, it doesn’t interfere with her volunteer time at her 8-year-old daughter’s school or with her tennis matches. “I have a $75-a-day habit; it’s ribbons,” she said.

For Mary Moore, working from home was more of a survival tactic than a diversion. She was an assistant vice president at Valley Federal Savings in Van Nuys when she was laid off. Pregnant and with two other children, Moore discovered through her husband, a private investigator, that there was a demand for record and chart photocopying. So Moore, 36, of Calabasas started A+ Photocopy, which subpoenas and photocopies records for worker-compensation cases. After two years in business, she says she’s doing better financially than ever before, and she’s home with her children.

Tyson, Moore and many others are part of a growing trend in home-based businesses run by women. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 8.4 million Americans worked at least eight hours a week at home-based businesses in 1985. The bureau also reports that the number of businesses owned by women has risen 62% in the past 10 years.

Although no statistics are available on home-based income, the data shows that most part-time workers make less than $4,000 a year working fewer than 35 hours a week. The average part-time worker makes 40% less per hour than a full-time worker; 80% work part time by choice. Author Charlene Canape, however, said she knows of several part-time workers who earn $75,000 a year.

While some make high incomes working at home, many home-based workers have chosen to live with less money to have more flexibility and time with their children and spouses. Some choose the lifestyle in exchange for the freedom to build a business with low overhead; others welcome the creative diversion of turning hobbies into small-scale businesses. Others have incomes that make home-based work not a necessity but a source of extra spending money, and some work from home to give themselves time to launch bigger and better careers.

According to Canape, author of “The Part-Time Solution” (Harper & Row, 1990, $18.95), home-based businesses are increasing rapidly, largely because of the flexibility they provide. “Not only does it cut commuting time, but a woman can put on the answering machine if her child care falls through, and once her children are in school, she can work around their hours very easily,” she said.

Canape, who worked out of her home in New York for seven years as a free-lance writer, says women become very creative when they work in home-based businesses. Some, she says, use their work to indulge their hobbies and others find innovative ways to apply skills they developed in previous jobs.

Wanda Clarke-Morin, for example, used her 11 years in fashion design to launch a free-lance pattern-making and production consulting business. She wanted the flexibility a home-based business could provide so she could spend more time with her husband, a musician who often works until 2 a.m. “I made the switch to have more quality time with my husband,” she said.

Clarke-Morin of Woodland Hills typically works from 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., making phone calls and appointments. She relaxes between 1:30 and 3, then teaches piano until 6 p.m. She enjoys teaching her 15 pupils but also uses it as a buffer to the income variability of her pattern business. She is back in her home office by 7 p.m. and works as late as midnight if necessary. “That’s something you can’t do working for someone,” she said. “My best creativity is in the evenings.”

Most of Clarke-Morin’s assignments involve making clothing patterns to solve a production problem, such as allowing for shrinkage that occurs during dyeing, or reducing the number of pieces it takes to make a jacket. She also makes patterns for people who have an antique or favorite dress they want to replicate.

Not only does the home-based business give Clarke-Morin flexibility, it also offers her the chance to blend two careers. “I have always had two major passions--the garment industry since I was 10, and music--and now I can indulge them both,” she said. “But anyone who’d have to have a strict schedule would hate it.”

Twelve-hour workdays and a long freeway commute to Columbia Studios drove Cynthia Riddle-Hunziker, 33, of Canoga Park to quit her full-time job in film and television development 2 1/2 years ago and work from home. She also wanted to devote herself to writing scripts and was planning to have a child. She needed time to get her career off the ground before the baby was born.

Riddle-Hunziker started working for NBC as a free-lance script-reader to stay in touch with what others in the business were doing. But after her husband’s contract as a computer consultant with Buena Vista International recently ended, her free-lance work has become the family’s main source of income.

She now spends a lot of time with her 18-month-old daughter Alyssa, taking her to NBC in Burbank when she picks up scripts or reviews them with her supervisor. Riddle-Hunziker says she tends to work best on deadline, so she often pulls late-night stints before a script review is due. She is paid $60 a script and does about three a week.

“It takes about two hours just to read the script, so it doesn’t amount to much per hour,” she said. “But I can do all the work at home, and I can do it with my daughter and not pay for day care. And I can be by my phone to get responses to the scripts I write.”

But juggling so many roles and activities can be frustrating. “With everything I have going, I feel scattered. If I had more hours in my day, I could get where I want to go quicker. But the way I’m doing it now, when I do get there, I’ll have a family around me to share my success.”

Beth Novak, 35, of Agoura Hills started WeeberWorks last year because she was tired of feeling dependent on her husband for income. “I was becoming somewhat depressed; I wanted to be creative and was all wrapped up in my husband, the kids and the house,” she said. Her children are 3 and 5 years old.

WeeberWorks is a home-based women’s and children’s casual-clothing business, named after Novak’s dog Weeber, whose picture is on the labels. Novak buys some clothes from a distributor, and designs and sews others herself, adding sequins, paint and lace to leggings and T-shirts that sell for $12 to $45. Her dining room is a full-time sewing room, and she sells the clothes from her house and at office and home clothing parties. She says she averages about $600 a show and makes at least a 60% profit on her gross sales.

“I feel like I have my cake and am eating it, too,” she said. “I’m making less than I would in a full-time job, but the stress is less. I have my husband, my kids and my creativity.”

Home-based business doesn’t work for everybody. Melissa Harris, 35, of Studio City tried working out of her home for a year and a half and recently opened an office in Westwood.

She left a vice presidency at First Interstate Bank in Los Angeles soon after she completed maternity leave. “The first day back I walked into an elevator and the first person I saw said, ‘Hi, mom.’ I burst into tears,” she said. She felt that the corporate environment primarily rewarded people based on the time they put into their jobs, and she yearned for less time at work and more flexibility.

So Harris quit and began a home-based business doing research for executive search firms. “It was very easy; all you really need is a desk and a phone,” she said.

But as time went on, she found her daughter, almost 2 years old, would bang on the door of her home office. Harris was distracted by what was going on in the small house, even though she continued to employ a sitter.

Now she goes into her Westside office at 7 every morning but is home by 4:30 p.m. She says she finds the clean break between home and office psychologically rewarding and enjoys the professional stimulation she gets from sharing her office with another woman in the same field.

Moore of A+ Photocopy sees other problems with a home-based business. She says her 12-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son hate her work. “They feel it’s an infringement on their time,” she said. Moore also dislikes the heavy responsibility of the business. “It’s all on your shoulders and you don’t have anyone to call when you want to call in sick,” she said.