BETHEL — As high school Nordic ski teams from across Maine converged here in early January for the annual Telstar Relays, the focus was on fun, team-building and the communal nature of the sport.

How many volunteers from the local Nordic community would work together to ready the course for the early-season race? Which of the winter’s new high school racers would reveal their potential for the first time? And . . . who would win the “wacky tights raffle”?

Each winter Susie Wight of Bethel makes a dozen pair of ski tights to be given as raffle prizes during the Telstar Relays awards ceremony. She took over the job nearly 20 years ago from Anita Remington, with whom the tradition began.

The race’s format — each school fields two four-person teams of two boys and two girls, who compete in one of two wave relays — gives everyone an early look at the season’s competition while emphasizing fun and camaraderie over rivalry.

Each leg of the relay is three kilometers, and skiers who are not part of the relay ski in an individual three-kilometer race, providing plenty of opportunities for spectators to cheer them on and for team members to celebrate each other’s accomplishments.

But the real winners are those racers whose names are drawn after the race to win one of the 12 pair of tights.

At the awards ceremony and raffle, audience members offer their opinion, expressed in whoops and hollers, about which gaudy pair of tights perfectly suits each winner.

“The tights hang from a clothesline across the stage, and the audience chooses the tights for the raffle winner by cheering when they get near the pair they think that person should have,” Telstar Nordic Coach Sarah Southam said. This year local racers Ricco Call of Telstar and Gould Academy’s Livy Clarke each won one of the coveted prizes.

Thirty years of tights

Wight first started making tights in 1987 after her husband, John, a longtime Gould Academy math teacher, asked her to make him a pair to wear for running. Others saw them and wanted a pair, too, so she made more. And more. By 1989, she had gone into business as Wight’s Tights.

“It all started with the nylon Lycra tights,” she said. She first started selling them on commission at the Sunday River Cross Country Ski Center. The staff there helped pitch the product by modeling the tights at work, some preferring those made from the flashiest patterned fabric Wight could find.

“I spent a lot of time going around to fabric stores, looking for zany-colored nylon-Lycra,” she said.

Shortly after going into business, Wight bought out Ma’s Sports in Hanover, N.H., acquiring patterns, fabric and machinery for making ski-racing and ski-jumping suits. She hired Pam Chodosh of Albany Township to remake the patterns, then got to work on a new product line.

“I think I made close to 300 ski-jumping suits in all,” Wight said.

Eventually, Wight even had her fabric specially made for the suits, purchasing 2,000 yards of nylon Lycra and having it bonded to an inner layer of quarter-inch foam. Then there was polar fleece — thousands of yards of it, purchased in bulk and turned into jackets, blankets, bathrobes, socks, hats and mittens.

“I like to say that I fleeced Bethel,'” she joked. “I used to write down the number of fleece jackets I made, but I stopped when I got to 1,000, and that was only about two years in.”

In a recent discussion on Facebook about Wight’s enduring contribution to local wardrobes, Cathy Newell noted that her two fleece bathrobes from Wight’s Tights are at least 22 years old, and still in daily use.

Erica Penzer wrote that her father, Dutch Dresser, “wore the leopard print bathrobe I gave him for decades, even to take the trash to the road and get the paper! Had I known he’d do that (as a teenager) I might have chosen a different print. He got the last laugh on that one.”

“We all have our own unique fleece blankets that came from you,” said Andee Alford, “and I still have a stash of a few headbands I bought when you were going out of business!”

“Not to mention my rotation of three black fleece vests that I wear to work every day,” her husband, Doug Alford, chimed in. “And my fleece tights that I use for (ski) patrolling every day!”

‘I was always there sewing’

For nearly 20 years, Wight kept her shop open six days a week, and if the store was open, she was there sewing.

“I’d start sewing at seven in the morning and take a break around noon to have lunch and go to the post office,” Wight said. Then she was back at her sewing machine until 5 p.m., and “many a night I would cut out garments from 6:30 until 10.”

Her two children were in middle and high school by the time she started keeping the demanding schedule, and it worked well because “I was always there sewing when they got home from school. They knew where to find me.”

“One day I made 98 pairs of mittens,” she said, adding that she had hoped to make it to 100, but “I got tired.”

Wight said she started sewing at the age of 7. The summer she was 12, her mother signed her up for a Singer sewing course during her summer vacation, and even though she attended the classes under protest, she learned some useful tips and tricks, and still remembers “a blue-and-green paisley two-piece outfit” she made for herself.

Her first paying job as a seamstress came in 1980 when a girls’ camp contracted her to repair their uniforms.

“Then a Gould faculty member found out that I knew how to hem pants and that really started things going,” she said. She took a few adult education sewing classes at Telstar, and noted that one class in particular, on working with zippers, was “the best three dollars I ever spent!”

Retired, but still sewing

After two decades, Wight closed the shop when she and her husband moved to their home in East Bethel in 2008. John Wight retired in 2010, after teaching at Gould for more than 30 years.

Wight still orders nylon Lycra fabric for tights wholesale from a company in New York City, because even though she’s no longer cranking out garments at the pace she set when her shop was open, she hasn’t stopped sewing.

“I still spend most mornings sewing. I probably put in about four hours a day now,” she said.

The Wights have four young grandchildren, including a set of 2-year-old twins, and she enjoys sewing for them.

“I made 10 sets of pajamas for Christmas this year, and — let me think — eight pairs of pants, I think,” she said.

She also does alterations and repairs, including replacing zippers, and in October she participated in the craft fair at the Newry Grange Hall, selling fleece hats and mittens.

This year, for the first time, Wight was able to attend the awards ceremony following the Telstar Relays and see firsthand the excitement generated by her handiwork. Writing about it on Facebook, she said, “I was totally overwhelmed to be recognized and given a standing ovation.”