
DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711150093

SECTION: HOME                    PAGE: G1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY MARY REID BARROW, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  135 lines

BEACH WOMEN HAVE DYED AND GONE TO HEAVEN

ON SUNNY DAYS, yards of linen pieces in shades of blues, reds, yellows and greens are stretched out to dry on the grass in Ann Robbins' Kempsville back yard in Virginia Beach.

The rich aroma of coffee exudes from coffee grounds sprinkled on other natural pieces of linen soaking up the sun on her deck.

The ambience is a treat for the senses, but it is serious business for Robbins and her partner Pat Ryan. The two are not local hobbyists but owners of R&R Reproductions, and these are designer linens that wing their way to needlework shops across the United States, pleasing eager customers and earning a tidy sum for the two partners.

Hand dyeing linen for needlework designers and for those who just love to embroider is all part of a day's work for Robbins and Ryan.

So is the painstaking job of counting stitches to create needlework charts of historic samplers from museum collections nationwide. Their copies of those samplers - decorative pieces of embroidery that young girls stitched in years gone by to demonstrate their embroidery skills - are sold in needlework shops around the country so hobbyists can reproduce the antiques themselves.

``You might pay $10,000 for a historic sampler from a famous family,'' Ryan said. ``But you would pay $5 to $10 for the sampler chart.''

Needlework aficionados who purchase the charts also can purchase linen that resembles the aged linen in the samplers seen in museums. That's where the java comes in. Raw linen dyed with various strengths of coffee and sometimes distressed with coffee grounds has an antique look.

When the two aren't dyeing fabric or reproducing samplers, they are traveling across the United States leading workshops on historic samplers. Ryan and Robbins take along some of their sampler reproductions and lecture about embroidery techniques. Dressed in costume, they tell about the history of needlework and what they have learned about the children who sewed the original samplers.

Both Ryan, a former nurse, and Robbins, a former teacher, have owned needlework shops in the past, but the two did not meet until four years ago. Robbins went to the Valentine Museum in Richmond to hear Ryan lecture about her first book, ``Historic Samplers, Selected from Museums and Historic Houses with 30 Cross-Stitch Charts for Authentic Reproduction.''

The two hit it off, and Ryan, who lived in Cape Cod, Mass., at the time and now lives in Virginia Beach, asked Robbins to be her partner in writing another book. Their first project together was copying a sampler in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts collection. It was sewn on green cloth, the likes of which Ryan and Robbins could not purchase.

Necessity became the mother of invention, and the two dyed a piece of fabric to match.

That's when it struck them how limited needlework fabric colors were. Big companies dye linens, Ryan noted, but sell them in huge lots which many small needlework shops cannot afford.

So Robbins and Ryan decided to sell hand-dyed fabric in quantities as small as a yard or a half yard. In fall 1994, they decided to introduce their linens to the market by offering their services to several needlework designers.

``We created special colors just for their companies,'' Robbins said. ``For example, Creek Bed Brown for Bent Creek (in Atlanta, Ga.). When the first designer used our fabric that first month, we grossed over $10,000 on that first color.''

Now they create custom-dyed linens for design companies across the country like Twisted Threads, Heart and Hand, Cricket Collection and Mosey & Me. Their linens come in about 125 colors in about 20 different-sized weaves, or in needlework parlance, ``counts.'' Counts are the number of threads to the square inch.

When needlework stores stock a designer's new pattern book, as the charted directions are called in the trade, they also stock the designer's recommended color of linen. ``If the pattern book is a big seller, the fabric tends to sell well, too,'' Robbins said.

Though hand-dyed fabrics were an afterthought, they are now the mainstay of the business. The historic sampler book went by the wayside, but they continue to reproduce individual sampler charts.

``If we wanted to live on what we make on the charts, we'd be starving,'' Robbins said. ``But we're not starving at all. We're doing very well.''

In all, R&R Reproductions now grosses close to $200,000 a year and its fabrics and samplers are sold in more than 600 needlework shops across the United States with five to six shops coming aboard every month. They have distributors in Chicago and Portland, Ore., and recently took on a distributor in Sydney, Australia.

The secret to their meteoric rise was the designer colors. When hobbyists purchase a needlework design created by Virginia Beach designer Colleen Pyatt of Hog River Designs, for example, they also can buy a piece of the exact color linen that Pyatt recommends for the background. That's because Robbins and Ryan have dyed the fabric at Pyatt's request, and needlework stores stock the fabric along with Pyatt's pattern.

Hog Wild Blue is one of the colors that Robbins and Ryan came up with to fit in with Pyatt's primitive folk art style. The blue fabric is over-dyed with coffee and distressed with coffee to make it look like it was run over by hogs.

``One (designer) cut off the leg of her blue jeans and sent it to me, saying, `This is the color I want,' '' said Robbins. ``Another sent a green leaf and said, `This is the color I want.' ''

They also dye a line of non-designer colors that includes various shades of blue like Delta Blue and Chesapeake Bay Blue or reds like Cranberry Bog and Cranberry Harvest. Their fabrics sell for between $32 and $40 for a half-yard in needlework stores.

Although reproduction sampler charts represent a small part of Ryan and Robbins' business now, it is dear to their hearts. They call the samplers ``our children,'' because they feel very close to the youngsters who sewed them long ago.

Today they have contracts with about 30 museums and historic houses to reproduce their samplers and now have about 85 sampler charts on the market, 20 of them from Virginia, two from Hampton Roads. The two pay royalty fees to the museums for each chart sold. Museums also use Ryan and Robbins' copies as back ups if their original should be destroyed.

The partners maintain a small office in Kempsville, but the real work is done right in Robbins' home. There, they hand dye about 1,000 yards of linen a week in buckets outside and lay them out to dry on the grass. College students, who work part time, iron the fabric in what was once Robbins' living room where it then awaits shipment.

They reproduce sampler charts on the living-room copying machine and package and ship them from Robbins' home, too.

In the future, the two plan to gradually expand their line of samplers and fabrics. They also plan to introduce sampler gift items, like calendars, address books and note paper.

``Sampler lovers want anything with a sampler on it,'' Robbins said.

But the fabric will probably remain the mainstay of the business. ``Even though it was a mistake,'' Ryan said, ``it was a nice mistake.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/The Virginian-Pilot

Pat Ryan, left, and Ann Robbins...

Photo

D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/The Virginian-Pilot

Pat Ryan holds a reproduction of an 1850 sampler, worked on some of

the coffee-dyed fabric that Ryan and her partner Ann Robbins

produce.

Graphic

HOW TO FIND THEM

[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]