Akademik

n.

A person who sews.

"I understand how teens like to shop and try on clothes, so maybe

you won't be able to make all, or even most of their clothes, but

after looking through the pattern catalogs, ready-to-wear styles

are available to the home sewist that will please a teen-ager."

— Sandra Millett, "It's much easier to sew than shop for teen-ager," The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, March 12, 2000

[Henry Jones was] an avid hunter who'd become an old hand at reupholstering Jeep seats and making sportsman's clothes for his field forays in pursuit of wildlife, he diversified his business interests by adding fabric to his shelves of staple goods.

'I wasn't a seamstress, obviously, and I sure didn't want to be called a sewer, because that looked too much like something else,' he recalled. 'Of course, we have to be so politically correct nowadays that the accepted term has become 'sewist.'

—Van Henderson, "Electrons and Stitches," Chattanooga Free Press, April 26, 1998

...or a sempstress as a 'sewist', or a conchologist as a 'shellist'. All these words may come into use among 'progressivists', but are equally abominable with 'scientists'.

—Annals of science, Volume 18, British Society for the History of Science, January 1, 1964

This word is a gender-neutral replacement for the older term seamstress. I thought it was relatively new, but then I discovered the 1964 citation, so it's really a bit long in the tooth for Word Spy, but I decided to keep it anyway.