Sew it goes: The Sewing Machine Project stitches lives back together

A tsunami helped Margaret Jankowski understand the real value of a sewing machine.

Like many girls of her generation, she had learned to sew at an early age. Her mother taught her on an old Singer Featherweight, and she learned the basics by hemming her father’s handkerchiefs. As an adult, she bought her own clothes off the rack but sewed for her first child, crafting little woolen coats that impressed other mothers. She taught classes at a sewing shop, “preaching the gospel of sewing,” she says, including how to make “pajamas comfortable enough to live in.”

Then, in December 2004, a tsunami hit Sri Lanka and other coasts around the Indian Ocean, leveling communities, hurling wooden fishing boats far inland, and killing 230,000 people. Images of the destruction riveted viewers around the world. But what touched Ms. Jankowski most deeply was the story of a woman returning to her ruined