Sandra Betzina’s Creative Career
The influential teacher and designer tells her unconventional story of success
Sandra Betzina has introduced and nurtured so many budding sewists over the years through her classes and seminars, numerous books, hundreds of published articles, and her television and online presence. Perhaps what folks know best about this prolific writer and charismatic teacher is her irrepressible excitement about sewing.
What I’ve gotten from Sandra is to not take sewing too seriously—it should be enjoyed, just as life should be enjoyed. She’s the eternal optimist. I like to call her the Auntie Mame of Sewing.
Sandra has been so well regarded that more than two decades ago, she was inducted into the American Sewing Guild Sewing Hall of Fame. Later, in 2015, she was given the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Sewing and Design Professionals.
This 81-year-old superstar of the sewing world retired from her rigorous travel and teaching schedule in 2023, but her sewing machine is never far away. She has it set up in her loft in San Francisco, where she moved with her husband, Dan Webster. “I still sew, I will always sew,” she says. “I love the process.”
Sandra’s fondness for travel hasn’t abated, either. While she may not be leading journeys to Morocco anymore, she says she still plans a group trip to Florence yearly—for the true fashion experience.
In the last few years, she’s made time to enjoy cooking. Unwilling to resist writing, she combined the two passions in 2020 by self-publishing Couture Cooking, a cookbook for her family. Sewing, writing, and teaching seem to have been as important as creating in the kitchen for all of Sandra’s life.
The early days
Sandra was in high school when she took an interest in sewing. But she didn’t have a sewing machine at home in Catonsville, Maryland, where she lived with her loving parents and brother. Her teacher let Sandra come into the classroom every day at 3 o’clock and stay until 4:30. The agreement was that Sandra could sew if she could get the 10 machines unjammed and ready to go for the next day. “I got pretty fast at that,” she remembers. She did that afterschool sewing for years.
Sandra had earned a scholarship to the American University. In her last year of college, she worked part-time as a speechwriter for the head of a library service in Washington, D.C. It was a job she disliked but it enabled her to save all her money for a trip. She quit and went to Europe for three months. When her money ran out and she returned home, she decided to find a job in which she could travel. There were so many places she wanted to see. Sandra was hired by Sabena Airlines, worked in their offices for four years, and traveled all over the world.
A move to San Francisco
In 1968, at a bus stop in a snowstorm, Sandra met a lawyer who worked for a Supreme Court judge. They eventually married and moved to San Francisco. Sandra attended the San Francisco Art Institute for a while, went to the beach every day, and sewed all her own garments.
“She’s the eternal optimist. I like to call her the Auntie Mame of Sewing.” —Kenneth D. King
Because Sandra’s clothes were always different, several of the wives of the lawyers in their circle asked if she would teach them to sew. After doing this for about a year, Sandra realized that none of the wives was serious. She decided to open a sewing school to the public in 1973. She called it the California School of Fashion Dressmaking.
Media and outreach
Sandra discovered that getting enough students to fill her classes was a challenge without substantial funds to pay for advertising. Always creative, she figured out a way around that obstacle—by writing a sewing column for the San Francisco Chronicle. But the challenge was to get past the barriers to contacting Ruth Miller, the women’s editor at the paper.
Sandra called the switchboard, and told the operator she and Ruth had a lunch date that she needed to change—could they put her call through? To her surprise, they did.
When Ruth answered, she asked Sandra how she got through. Sandra fessed up and explained what she had told the operator. Ruth then asked, “So, when are we having lunch?”
At that lunch, Ruth asked Sandra to submit some articles, and she coached Sandra on how to write for the newspaper. The “Power Sewing” column was born. Fortunately, Ruth Miller believed in the column and had it syndicated through Scripps Howard News Service. Sandra wrote this weekly column for 36 years.
During this same period, Sandra promoted her sewing school by securing a weekly spot on local television station, KPIX, on the morning talk show People Are Talking. From then on, she no longer had trouble attracting students.
Work-life balance
Sandra’s first marriage ended, but after being on her own with her daughter for a time, she met Dan. Their family began to grow. It was 1979 and she had a year-old son and was pregnant with twins. That’s when she made the difficult decision to sell the sewing school for $5,000. It was closed by the new owner shortly thereafter.
One of the school’s students had been Marcy Tilton. She and Sandra became fast friends. So when Marcy was looking for a way to connect the artistic community to the sewing community, Sandra encouraged her to open The Sewing Workshop in the early 1980s. Sandra joined Marcy in teaching classes.
“People loved her, and I hoped she would teach her fitting classes forever,” Marcy says. “At the time, she had just had twins and she told me that I needed to teach fitting myself and the best way to learn was to assist her in her fitting classes . . . which I did, and learned deeply.”
At one point, the American Sewing Guild hired Sandra as a spokesperson to promote sewing by teaching at sewing guilds and private fabric stores around the country. This part-time job worked perfectly for Sandra and her family. The children were now in school, so Dan could handle things while she was traveling.
Sandra arranged it so that she never taught in the summer. The couple owned a house on the California coast, above Mendocino, one block from the beach where the family spent every summer. They would leave for the beach house on the day school ended and return to San Francisco the day before school started in the fall. Sandra says this was the happiest time in her life.
Success on TV
One summer, Sandra got a call from HGTV requesting a personal interview. They were looking for someone to host a daily how-to sewing show called Sew Perfect. Though HGTV was in Knoxville, Tennessee, they made it work, because the filming was in seasons, usually two weeks at a time. Sandra filmed 256 shows for HGTV, beginning in 1995. The show ran for six years.
“Her energy is contagious. She is funny and fun and, at the same time, knows her material inside out.” —Marcy Tilton
Guests on her show, including me, found her funny, encouraging, and enthusiastic. My entire experience went quite smoothly. This doesn’t happen all the time in TV.
Today’s Fit patterns
Because of Sandra’s popularity through Sew Perfect, Vogue patterns asked her if she would create a line of patterns. At the meeting with the patternmaker’s executives, Sandra agreed only if she could develop her own sizing to ensure a correct fit. After much research, she developed her signature sizing. The line is called Today’s Fit. Sandra designed more than 220 patterns for Vogue under this label, ending in 2023.
Sandra’s ClosetTo see some designs from the last 20 years of her career, go to PowerSewing.com and click “Closet.”
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Branching out Online
As the internet was gaining traction in the late 1990s, Sandra decided to do a series of sewing shows called Power Sewing WebTV, with Canadian sewing expert Ron Collins. They produced 250 episodes together, which are now available for free on YouTube. Collins, who met Sandra at a sewing show in Edmonton, Canada, expressed his appreciation for his cohost on a Power Sewing episode years ago: “I am very fortunate to work with the best person in the industry.”
Sandra also taught four Craftsy classes: “Choosing and Using Your Favorite Fabrics, “Sewing on the Bias,” “Pant Fitting Techniques,” and “Pant Construction Techniques.”
Return to In-Person Classes
Around this time, she started offering weeklong, in-person classes in San Francisco. She worked with couture-trained Elke Haines. For 14 years, they taught 10 classes a year. Each class was limited to 10 students.
Marcy, who was one of Sandra’s students and a fellow teacher years before these weeklong classes, has known about Sandra’s hand-on approach to instructing.
“Sandra loves what she teaches and it shows. She is full of enthusiasm with a fresh outlook on making clothes that is reflected in her own personal style, which reflects her outgoing personality and love of life. She does not hold back, her energy is contagious. She is funny and fun and, at the same time, knows her material inside out.”
Impact abroad
Sandra traveled to Ethiopia in the early 2000s and taught Seamstress School class at a school set up by the nonprofit Project Mercy. The group’s founder sent Sandra a thank-you note in 2010 “with some words of excitement about how those that took the classes will be able to find employment,” says Project Mercy’s Josh Patterson.
It’s just another example of her lasting influence on sewists everywhere. Even in retirement, Sandra still shares her love of teaching through her online lessons and books.
Books from Sandra Betzina• Power Sewing (1985). Sandra Betzina says she wrote and self-published her first book using an inheritance from her father. The articles from her syndicated “Power Sewing” newspaper column formed the basis for the Power Sewing books. • Fear of Sewing (Top Banana Graphics, 1991). Geared to beginners, the book goes “step-by-step through the sewing • No Time to Sew (Rodale Books, 1996) Intended to get more people to sew, the book-and-pattern combination sold more than 200,000 copies. • Fabric Savvy (The Taunton Press, 1999). In the 1990s, Sandra decided to write a book about sewing with different fabrics. Many viewers of her HGTV Sew Perfect program had written to her, asking about how to work with different fabrics. This project turned out to be a huge endeavor, which took Sandra lots of time and experimenting at the machine. Sandra sent Kenneth D. King the copy, knowing he sewed as much as she did. He reviewed the manuscript, and she incorporated his suggestions into the final draft.
• Power Sewing Toolbox 1&2. This set of books contains 550 tips. Sandra self-published them because she wanted hardback covers with enclosed spiral binding. They include a DVD showing some of the more difficult concepts. • Sandra Sews for Your Home (The Taunton Press, 2002). Sandra teamed up with Debbie Valentine, who had a flourishing home decorating business, to write the guide.
•Fast Fit: Easy Pattern Alterations for Every Figure (The Taunton Press, 2003) Sandra believed that if she could accurately describe fitting problems and their solutions, she could help many sewers. Writing this book was fun, she says, as they used cartoons to show the fitting issues and alterations.
• Couture Cooking (2020) This self-published, spiral-bound collection contains 60 recipes Sandra wrote for her family. |
Kenneth D. King, a Threads contributing editor, met Sandra Betzina in 1989 and the two have been friends since.
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