Deepa BharathBoaters apparently love embroidered stuff. Barbara...

Deepa Bharath

Boaters apparently love embroidered stuff.

Barbara “Corki” Rawlings knows that because she has made a

business out of it for 33 years in Newport Beach.

The 68-year-old Rawlings started off hand-embroidering boat names,

nautical designs and motifs on shirts, hats, jackets and even pillow

and cushion covers. But now, like everything is these days,

embroidering is computerized, she said.

“The design is digitized on to a disk, and that is fed into the

sewing machine’s computer,” she said.

She threads the needles, and the machine takes it from there.

Rawlings originally owned Nikki’s flags, where she and her

husband, Gary, made mostly nautical flags as well as did embroidery.

But 10 years ago, she sold that business and decided to take up

something “easier” as a retirement project.

“But there was a lot of demand for embroidering, and now it’s a

full-time business,” she said.

The challenges are many, but being in the business for a long time

has helped them get “comfortable with it,” Rawlings said.

“Placement of the design is important,” she said. “You also need

to get it straight and make sure you get the colors right.”

She does a wide variety of work, but her biggest project was

completed about two months ago when she did pillow covers for a large

boat.

“It involved 80,000 stitches and took us two full days to

complete,” Rawlings said.

The computerized sewing machine puts together 600 to 700 stitches

per minute, she said.

Though it gets hectic sometimes, Rawlings said she enjoys the job.

“I like that we get to meet a lot of nice people,” she said. “And

every job is different. There’s so much variety. You never get

bored.”