RALEIGH, N.C. -- For Cecilia Zuvic-Norton, family history is held together with needle and thread -- and a little bit of lace trim for good measure.

Zuvic-Norton, 30, comes from a grandmother and mother who design and make clothes that, until recently, were worn only by family members in Argentina. But now, the designs of her mother, Ema Calderon, who lives in the Argentine state of Santa Cruz, are available at a boutique in Raleigh. And designs by Zuvic-Norton, who works full-time for a software company, and her partner are sold at the same store.

It's a tale of cross-border success with its own international wrinkles: Calderon has found a retail outlet for her one-of-a-kind items for the first time at the age of 57. And Zuvic-Norton has found her way back to design after years of shying away, for fear she couldn't live up to her mother's talent.

Both Calderon and Zuvic-Norton use the same word when describing their designs.

"It's like a dream for me to be able to show my clothes in the United States," Calderon says in a telephone interview from Santa Cruz. "It's very important to me."

Zuvic-Norton dreams of working full-time as a designer. "You said dream, and that's it, D-R-E-A-M," she says. "We know this is just starting, and it will go somewhere else. It's too exciting just to leave it here."

Zuvic-Norton found her way back to the sewing machine, however reluctantly, when she fell in love with an American man doing a journalism internship in Argentina.

She moved to the United States and eventually looked for a stop-gap job to hold her over so she could plan her wedding in Argentina. She landed at Galatea, selling other designers' clothes at the Raleigh boutique. There she wore her mother's designs, including a brown, thigh-length jacket with a zipper that was fitted through the torso. It caught boutique owner Cheryl Fraser's attention.

So Fraser took a chance on an Argentine woman who had never made clothes for a commercial market, and Calderon began sending her daughter clothes to sell to the women of Raleigh.

HONING THE IDEA

There were cultural differences -- sizing, for instance. That remains a challenge for Calderon, whose extra larges tended to be more like an American medium at first. That's not surprising considering she comes from a country where the Buenos Aires province passed a law requiring stores carry a full range of sizes as one way of dealing with microscopic bits of apparel that might encourage women to become anorexic or bulimic to fit into the latest fashions.

Zuvic-Norton, for example, wears a size 0 or 2 in U.S. jeans; in Argentina, she's the equivalent of a U.S. size 6 or 8. "Granted, we are smaller, but it was getting crazy," she says.

Calderon has struggled both with sizes and translating her ideas to clothes that suit American women. "This has been a real challenge for me because I had to observe a lot in the United States -- the sizes, how American women carry themselves -- and try to put Argentine culture into clothes for American women," she says.

The visits have helped Calderon make clothes that better fit the Galatea customer. "When she comes over here for trunk shows, she's always surprised at how tall and voluptuous American women are," Fraser says. "Her coming and visiting and hanging out at the store for days at a time has really helped her be able to pinpoint our customer base."

Calderon likes rickrack trim, flourishes such as small feather pompoms on the end of zippers that run up the back of a tunic, along with sensible touches like pockets. A linen sheath in a gold color with brown trim and a handmade fabric belt carries the Ema tag, as does a low-cut halter dress in a leopard print. Prices range from about $60 for a purse to $300 for a sweater or evening gown.

Although she can sew from a pattern, just as frequently she will drape fabric on a dummy and see what comes to her.

"She's really a true designer so sometimes as a true designer, she'll make these wonderful pieces that could go on a runway somewhere but are a little more high maintenance," Fraser says. "She's working her way toward things that are really wearable for everyday life now."

HARNESSING MEMORIES

As she helped market her mother's clothes, Zuvic-Norton felt an urge to design. But her mother's talent held her back. She recalls falling asleep at night to sewing-machine sounds as her mother -- after tending to five children all day -- made clothes, including a new dress for every coming-of-age party to which her four daughters were invited.

"When you're 15 and 16, you get invited to a lot of these parties. And it's not OK to be wearing the same dress all the time, not at that age," Zuvic-Norton says. "Of course, they were the shortest dresses. My mom doesn't do long dresses, not at that age."

When her mother was too busy, Zuvic-Norton would turn to her grandmother, now 94. But that could be dangerous. "If I go to my grandmother to make a dress for me, it would be even shorter and tighter," she says. "So it was a risk."

After Galatea began selling her mother's clothes, Zuvic-Norton and a friend, Sarah Powers, were knocking around, looking for a project of their own. They started a label called Urbana Apparel, making mainly T-shirts and tunics that Zuvic-Norton sews and embellishes with touches such as lace and ties. Powers, an artist, does silk screens of abandoned buildings in the area that adorn the items.

They make the clothes from bamboo, organic cotton and linen, or they take items that didn't sell at Galatea and fashion them into items that are both wearable and one-of-a-kind. Prices range from $70 to $150.

The work takes Zuvic-Norton back to her childhood, when her mother sewed far into the night, just as Calderon remembers her own mother, Elena Gonzales de Calderon, doing when she sewed for the society ladies in Mendoza, Argentina.

"When I'm at a sewing machine, it sounds like it used to sound when my mom and my grandmother used to sew," Zuvic-Norton says. "And it's just relaxing because when I was a kid, it was what I would hear."

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