Atsuko Sato, one of the three needlewomen present that day, showed me a pair of Converses covered with cotton pieces in different hues of blue and accented with some purple stitching. “This kind of fabric is very soft, so it was not that difficult to sew on,” said Ms. Sato, 66. “But later I started working on different materials, and some of them are very hard.”

At that point, she indicated a pair of New Balance sneakers that she said had taken her colleague, Ruiko Ishii, a total of 23 hours to complete.

Ms. Ishii, 79, who was also in the workroom that day, had worked as a laboratory technician before the tsunami. “I lost almost everything, my home, my husband,” she said. “I was desperate. I felt the worst in my life at the time.”

She was one of the women who learned the technique at the evacuation center. “I was not good at sewing,” she said, “but I decided to try anyway. I was so overwhelmed by the atmosphere in the workshop. So welcoming, so loving, so calming. There, I found some hope.”

Ms. Goto, 77, said she had found sashiko work to be very calming. “Before that, although I was watching TV, I wasn’t able to hear it really,” she said, referring to how hard it was to bypass all her worries. “But when I started sewing, I could concentrate on it and I could forget about the experience I had gone through.” While she was talking, she had been busy using a long needle with a slightly curved end to stitch a pattern with multicolored thread onto a dark blue tablecloth dyed with indigo.

The women said they did talk about how to spread the word about sashiko and ultimately perpetuate their project.