THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 4, 1996 TAG: 9601310035
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LORRAINE EATON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 63 lines
IT LOOKS LIKE 1996 will be a banner year for moths.
This winter, Laura Boltz, owner of French Reweaving in Norfolk, has seen more moth ruin than she's seen in the past three years combined. Her customers come cradling coats and table linens, shirts and skirts, jackets, blazers, hats - all victims of ravenous, cloth-eating larvae.
Her mission: to erase all traces of the scourge.
Boltz is one of a precious few practitioners of the dying art of reweaving cloth. She employs three free-lance weavers and is training another using yellowing manuals that are 40 years old. No one is French, although one weaver is a Polish immigrant and one is Korean.
Boltz, a former real estate secretary who ``wound up with an ulcer trying to keep all the agents happy,'' started working and training at French Reweaving in March 1983. By November 1983, the weavers allowed her to do her first simple repair - a single loop in a green sweater. She and her husband, Carey, bought the 50-year-old business in 1985.
These days when Boltz gets down to work, she straps a jewelers' magnifying visor across her forehead and begins discreetly borrowing fabric or threads from hidden hems and seams. She pins the garment to a padded brick and then, with a hinged needle no wider than a cotton thread, she grafts and weaves and grafts and weaves and grafts and weaves.
To repair a single hole takes from one to 25 hours depending on the type of fabric and the intricacy of the pattern. ``You can sit for hours and hours and not talk to anyone,'' Boltz said. ``It's like surgery.''
Reweavers like Boltz know things that most of us don't, like that gabardine is not a type of fabric, it's a type of weave. They know that ``woof'' describes threads running horizontally and ``warp'' vertically. They also know that moths prefer red.
In fact, Boltz is reweaving a 30-something-year-old red cashmere pullover that a ``gentleman'' has brought in three times before. This time, the moths will cost him about $25. He couldn't replace it for that.
Business is brisk. For example, between Jan. 2 and 4, Boltz took in $1,797 worth of work, including some simple sewing repairs, a few worn crotches and some cigarette burns, but mostly moth holes. Her ``nice little businesses'' grosses about $80,000 a year.
Reweaving, Boltz said, was particularly popular during the world wars when people had to make everything last longer. Today, her customers mostly want to salvage expensive pieces. Or, like the man who brought in a brown plaid overcoat covered with more than 50 moth holes, they want to preserve an item of sentimental value. The coat is the man's grandfather's. He wants to pass it on to his son.
Doing work like that is gratifying to Boltz. That, and the fact that no one bothers you, are the upsides of the work. The downside is the headaches that usually strike one eye at a time.
Aspirin?
``Daily,'' said Boltz, ``or darn near.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
JIM WALKER/The Virginian-Pilot
``It's like surgery,'' says Laura Boltz, who runs the French
Re-Weaving Co. in Norfolk. Her business repairs damaged clothing.
by CNB