Do-It-Yourself TV -- Shows Featuring Crafts, Home Repair, Cooking, Hobbies And Gardening Are Fueling An Industry

"Oh, Sue, you are so clever," says the television host to her guest expert, who is demonstrating how to wrap fabric around a sausage-shaped pillow and tie the ends with ribbon. Coming up next on Home and Garden Television: How to build a gazebo.

And on Lifetime: How to glue beads on lampshades.

And on the Discovery Channel: How to make a gilded curio shelf.

All over daytime television, especially on cable, the world is learning how to sew a crib bumper, inject a squash plant with pesticide, install a sink, create a Victorian bouquet, take out Sheetrock, make a salad or a quilt, and set a table. No longer is daytime the sole province of soap operas and talk shows.

Dozens of these "lifestyle" shows focused on the domestic arts - home repair, decorating, cooking, gardening, crafts, hobbies, pets and remodeling - are drawing millions of viewers, a new audience made up of not only traditional housewives but also telecommuters and home-business proprietors.

Most Seattle-area cable subscribers receive the Discovery Channel as part of a basic cable package. HGTV and The Learning Channel are available at extra cost to most TCI subscribers in King and Snohomish counties.

The popularity of these cable shows speaks to the American love affair with home, reflected most clearly in the $587 billion that Americans spend on home improvement, crafts, decorating and gardening every year. "Our theory was there was a lot of interest in what to do with the products they were buying," says Burton Jablin, senior vice president of HGTV, a 24-hour cable channel based in Nashville. Started in 1993, HGTV - the network that boasts "the only show on television entirely devoted to furniture" - now claims 32 million viewers and has sold packages of programming to networks in Japan, Australia, Canada and Europe.

"Look at a Home Depot . . . on a Saturday morning," Jablin says. "It's like Disneyland."

"Your New House," "House to Home," "HouseSmart!," "Home Matters," "Our Home" - the names are almost interchangeable. The hosts of these shows, usually a male-female team, tend to dress in denim and call on numerous "experts," who are often employed by chain stores like Target or suppliers such as Pittsburgh Corning.

Some hosts, like Christopher Lowell and Lynette Jennings on Discovery, are smoothly professional and have developed their own loyal followings and lines of tie-in products. Others are low-rent Martha Stewarts on tacky-looking sets, too prone to saying, "That's adorable!" or hurrying their experts in a confusing rush. What was that about uncoupling the slip nuts that connect the drain pipes?

"Lefty loosey, righty tighty!" is one of the frequently heard "tips" from screwdriver-wielding demonstrators. (Or as the hosts of the new, hipper Discovery show "Gimme Shelter" put it, "Lefty Lucy, righty Ricky!") "This is so easy!" is another frequent refrain, not always convincing.

"We are feathering our nests more; home and hearth mean more to us," says Chuck Gingold, daytime programming chief at the Bethesda-based Discovery Channel and its sister, The Learning Channel, which reach 70 million and 60 million households, respectively. "We're cocooning, as the demographers say, returning to a different set of values. And the daytime viewer is different from 10 years ago. The audience is expanding economically and intellectually."

Call it what you will - cocooning, voyeurism, wishful thinking - these shows can be addictive. In fact, you can spend so much time watching them you never actually fix anything in your house.

Discovery schedules these shows between 9 and 5 daily, while The Learning Channel has them from noon to 8. HGTV has 700 new episodes for its 1997-98 season, including some new tours of celebrity houses, starting with Carol Burnett's early this month.

PBS, which really created the template for these shows with "This Old House" nearly 20 years ago, reserves the weekends for its "Great American Desserts" and "Victory Garden"-type programming. "This Old House" is still the network's highest-rated show, even though the original host, Bob Vila, took his act commercial, endorsing a line of products and creating a new syndicated show, "Home Again With Bob Vila," with its own magazine. The new hosts of "This Old House," Steve Thomas and Norm Abram, were promoted after years in supporting roles.

Christopher Lowell, 41, was a theater lighting and set designer, and actor, who segued into commercials and tableware design. Inspired by the success of Martha Stewart, he opened a "Decorative Arts Center" in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, a combination store and school, and it was a big success. "I felt if I could really understand the pulse point of what men and women really wanted, what their fears were about decorating their home, I could redirect my career," he says.

Now he gets 2,000 letters a week from viewers of "Interior Motives," his one-hour daily home-decorating show (noon and 3 p.m. weekdays on Discovery), and is developing a line of books, fabrics and paints. He is a self-described "flamboyant, androgynous character" who plays the piano for his studio audience and occasionally dresses up as Scarlett O'Hara or Arnold Schwarzenegger while trying to redecorate a room in a viewer's house on a budget.

"Don't we love that?" he'll say to the audience as he surveys a finished bit of frippery. "This is so much fun!"

Lowell has a philosophy undergirding his jollity. "We were addressing self-esteem issues first," he says of his early efforts. "They needed to understand the way they lived was a reflection of who they were. It had to be life-affirming, lots of fun, and get people to take action. We began to see that what was capturing them was the humor - when they were surrendered in involuntary emotion, they were learning. Then they would come back and say, `This is translating into every area of my life - my relationships are better, I am three-dimensionally creative.' "

The influence of Martha Stewart is much debated among the creators of home shows. Discovery's Gingold says his organization's push to create these shows began in 1990, predating the Stewart boom. But Lowell acknowledges a debt, albeit a kind of negative one.

"I'm the Band-Aid for Martha Stewart wannabes who didn't make it," he says. "A lot of people collect all the materials and find they are already over budget, and that undermines self-esteem. I don't consider her how-to. She is showing you how she lives her life."

Lowell redesigns 35 rooms in about three weeks for his show, doing most of the work himself. He reassures his audience with helpful "basic principles" (like "stick to three colors") and touts his "seven layers of design." He has redone a room for as little as $135, plus donated paint and fabric. "People don't realize that it really is me up at 4 a.m. with the staple gun in my hand," he says.

His own house? He lives in a house at the La Costa spa near San Diego and spends his free time sculpting, painting and writing a musical. He's three-dimensionally creative.

Most of these shows are relatively inexpensive to produce. Many are made by regional production companies in places like Philadelphia, Denver and Minneapolis. Manufacturers seem happy to supply demonstration materials in return for a feature about their products.

"The hallmark of any of our shows is that it include some combination of Ideas, Information and Inspiration. We really live by that," said HGTV's Jablin.

A viewer might have a hard time differentiating between the how-to shows and the lifestyle programs, or between the experts and the shills. But the producers know they can count on one common denominator: They are all G-rated.

"I come from television news," Jablin says. "The reaction from that audience is completely different than this. In L.A. and in Chicago, (news) viewers hated everything we did, blamed us for all the ills of society. With our (HGTV) viewers, 99 percent of the response is glowing. It's almost a religious experience to read the mail. I think what we're doing is something useful in a way that respects their intelligence. I call it useful escapism. Even if you aren't going to go out and do all these things, it does give you a sense they can be done."

Seattle Times reporter Joe Heim contributed to this report.