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Retiring at 40
By SHARON L. BOND
© St. Petersburg Times, ST. PETERSBURG -- The Sewing Circle, started at Tyrone Gardens by Olga Cheyunski in 1961, when girls still sewed the clothes they took to college, closes at the end of the month. This is a business whose stock in trade changed as society did. After decades of selling material for everyday clothes, band uniforms and debutante gowns, the Sewing Circle is ending as a place whose focus is quilting. Mrs. Cheyunski's daughter and son-in-law bought the store in 1990 and moved it to its current location, at 408 33rd Ave. N. "We've done this for a long time. Our family needs have changed," said her daughter Ann Puffer of the closing. Both she and her mother said the Sewing Circle had a following. "Somebody's coming in all the time," Mrs. Cheyunski said. During her tenure, Ms. Puffer started Camp Sew, which brings in children ages 6 to 16 each summer. The last class ends Thursday. In fact, she said she starting helping in the store at age 6. But its success and survival are her mother's story, she said. The first Sewing Circle was an outlet of the Riegel Textile Corp., Mrs. Cheyunski said. She went to the Tyrone Gardens location to close it. "We did so well that they decided to keep it open," said Mrs. Cheyunski, who is 81. In fact the corporation moved the cloth shop to a larger space in Tyrone Gardens, a former appliance shop. "It had electrical outlets for washers and dryers. So we had seminars on how to take care of fabrics and cloth, washing and drying," she recalled. "You find lemons, you make lemonade." Mrs. Cheyunski said she started sewing at age 9 after a ruptured appendix one summer. After her hospitalization, she had to be kept quiet. So she was taught to sew. In her corporate life, Mrs. Cheyunski said St. Petersburg's Sewing Circle became the sales center to beat in the Riegel corporation. "We had sales quotas. They were goals to be met. I just took the challenge." She said that when you were a store manager for Riegel, you did everything: the buying, the advertising, controlling the inventory, running the store, teaching classes, even cleaning up. That responsibility and autonomy helped ease her transition from manager to owner when she bought the store from Riegel in 1977. In the following years, the onslaught of polyester, rise of clothing sales from catalogs and "jeaning of America," as Mrs. Cheyunski put it, changed the Sewing Center's emphasis on what it sold. "I came from an era where the girls made their back-to-college wardrobes," Mrs. Cheyunski said. That changed when jeans became the uniform for college men and women. So she guided the Sewing Circle into a niche for quilting lessons, supplies and a place to practice the art. This came in the late 1970s after a quilter was ecstatic at discovering 20 bolts of 100 percent cotton in the shop. "The purist doesn't want anything but 100 percent cotton," Mrs. Cheyunski said. "Quilting is becoming international. Quilting is women's history."
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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