Sunshine Stitchers greet campers

By Coastal Breeze News Staff

Campers at the YMCA Summer Day Camp take field trips each week to learn about various businesses and services around the island. This week, Janice Ayasun, owner of Sunshine Stitchers, along with her daughter-in-law Stephanie, and Sunshine Stitchers in-house designer and staff member Amber Bragenzer and employee Danielle Pippitone, welcomed 23 children from the YMCA Summer Day Camp to her business for a birds-eye view of their business operation.

The campers saw the variety of products available, learned where the products come from and the difference between retail and wholesale business operations. They heard about independent business ownership

and the level of commitment and work involved. They learned about the speed of production seeing one embroidery machine in action to seeing what embroidery on a four head machine looks like.

Children were able to pick out an embroidery design, get the image digitally from specialized software on a computer and then program the high-tech embroidery machine to sew the design onto a hat. They chose a graphic of a crown with almost 7000 individual stitches. While half the group oversaw the embroidery machine working, the other half learned how an image is transferred onto a t-shirt.

The children were inquisitive, but

the learning went both ways when the children wondered if the shop carried ‘snapbacks’. After a few questions, shop staff learned a baseball cap with a straight flat bill is now called a ‘snapback’. One youngster declared she planned to start shopping there on a regular basis, while another said her mother works in the sewing department for a wholesale embroidery company out of the area.

Before they left, camp counselors were given a box filled with t-shirts decorated to commemorate the camper’s time at the store. Although they didn’t have too many ‘snapbacks’ in stock, they certainly had enough baseball caps to keep each child happy!