UCLA sucks

Ahhh. . . college football season has begun, and there's good reason for me to stay indoors and stitch. I really can't wait until next Sunday, when I will have an excuse to sit in front of the television all day watching football. USC played a very good game today, and I got all the colors except for ecru completed on the magnolia and the stems completely backstitched. If only there were a full day of football tomorrow, I'd get it done. Inevitably, I will be dragged outside this holiday weekend to enjoy the sun and the surf. I will be finished this square of the afghan early, which is pleasing even if it is one of the smaller flowers.

I'm trying to figure out what to do about next weekend. My parents will be here for the last meet of Del Mar, and we're heading down. The drive should give me several good stitching hours (round trip), but my mother will be there, and this is a gift for her. I guess I could leave it in the trunk (properly wrapped, of course) and bring a secondary project to throw her off.

Good sale at Jo-Ann's this weekend. I got lots of stuff, none for cross-stitch. Several hanks of chenille for Stephanie's scarf, some fleece for a scarf for me, several patterns, and some cute cotton to make pajama pants for myself. Oh, wait: I did get some needles--24s for the current project. I've been stitching with the old needle for too long, and my acidic? skin has taken off the plating. I wash my hands at least once an hour, but I am genetically disposed to ruin needles. Don't even buy me gold ones, I go right through them.

Madame Defarge

When I'm stitching, my dad always refers to me as Mme Defarge. How many times do I have to answer, "She knit!" before it sinks in? Like my friend MB says, it's that stupid Quilted Northern commercial all over again. Remember? The women were quilting with knitting needles. D'oh! No one in the ad office or the tp company had ever seen anyone quilt before? Or were they just not paying attention? The ad came out after How to Make an American Quilt.

I guess there's a lot about "women's work" that's invisible to outsiders (male or female). It seems so obvious to the insiders, but I guess it's not:

I've had people thank me for the petit-point and needlepoint I've done for them (it was cross-stitch)

the soldier who asked me to sew his button didn't realize my needle was blunt while sewing needles are sharp (much better to ask a quilter)

the confusion between knitting/quilting/needlework in contemporary culture and my contemporary family

the program director who assured me that all Polish girls would be accomplished needleworkers (she's living in fantasy land)

Maybe stitchers need a stitch-out like the knitters and crocheters have. Tiny-needled women of the world, unite!

Hunh, I wouldn't think you did needlework.

Do you get that often?

"People" must just think that women who do needlework are . . .what? Quiet? Feminine? Domestic? Dull? Conservative? Certainly I'm none of these things. Loud. Feminist. Untamed. Liberal.

But when did feminine get to be the opposite of feminist? It's not easy to point to the 70s--some feminists did indeed go the "earth mother" route, which included embroidery, bread baking, motherhood. Needlework today isn't Jane Austen's needlework. Sure, some dumb-ass soldier sitting next to me in a plane might ask me to sew on a button (um, the needle is BLUNT!), but we don't do it anymore to prove we know the alphabet and can mark our family linens. We don't do it to prove we're women, even if that's what some people might think about it.

But there's no arguing about dull, is there? In a women's history class I took at Columbia we read Loom and Spindle: or, Life among the early mill girls. We were discussing how these women spent their days in the mill and then went home and did needlework. Ok, I brought it up since no one else had noticed they spent their days sewing and then went home to do more sewing. Everyone agreed that they must have had unbelievably tedious lives. As a stitcher, I disagreed that spending an evening stitching after a hard day sewing would be more of the same. I feel stresses leave my body even if I am hunched over a difficult project. It's another thing.

Bust-in' out all over

The new issue of Bust came today, and in it, I found an advertisement for this site: Sublime Stitching. The designs by embroiderer Jenny Hart are retro and cool, "not your gramma's embroidery." The pirate's probably going to jump to the top of the post-afghan stitching pile since the Dude's writing a pirate movie. The mermaids are groovy too. Make sure to read Jenny's story about how she got into stitching; it's pictorial and very touching.

I haven't done a lot of surface embroidery since I was a kid: I did a lot of crewel back in the 70s. Until my dissertation advisor's retirement last year... I contributed a square to a quilt people made. Mine was the only embroidered piece--I did a portrait of Lizzie Borden sneaking up on her father with an axe. I based it on Chris Hamilton's paintings of Lizzie Borden that I found on the web (they've disappeared, though a google images search will take you to the ghost). It makes sense in context: my dissertation was on women's violence. I did it in chain stitch with rayon floss. What a bitch, but it looks great. If I can get a picture of it, I'll post it here. Shoulda thoughta that sooner.

Time

I am trying to find a new job, so stitching time has been given over to writing resumes and cover letters. I did take a break to watch Queer Eye, and started work on the last magnolia leaf. It doesn't look like much of a leaf yet. . .

Magnolia

I've finished two leaves on the magnolia, and about 1/3 of the flower. I had almost completed backstitching the petals that I had done when I realized (d'oh!) that I was using the wrong color. I'm supposed to read the fine print? The mistake came in handy when I went to backstitch the leaves. Chose the right color this time.

Housesitting now for a colleague. Petsitting, really. His little dog likes to get on the afghan and chew it. Fortunately, his teeth are very small, and he knows the word NO.

What are you working on?

I’ve got about 20 projects going if you count everything I’ve started but haven’t completed. I’ve had to put it all aside to get my mother’s 60th birthday present finished for next April. I am doing Maureen Appleton’s Floral Afghan. I started about 2 years ago, but was working at the rate of about one square per year because I had so many other things that needed doing. Now that I realized that I have about 3 weeks per block left before the Big Party, I’ve had to cut out every other project.

I’ve done the Canterbury Bells, Impatiens Basket, geraniums, lilacs, and rosehips. I’m in the middle of the magnolia which is due to be finished by September 5th.

Other projects on the go: Shepherd’s Bush, Toy Gatherer; Birds of a Feather, “A Man of Sense”; a bunch of Sandy Cozzolino’s Santa ornaments; about half a dozen projects I started at classes but haven’t finished; Terence Nolan’s St. Basil’s Cathedral; Twisted Threads, Itty Bitty Trio of Hearts. On April 6th I’m planning on getting back to some of these projects that have gone by the wayside.

I’ve also got to be better about finishing. I’ve taken a couple of classes recently to help with this. One at The Silver Needle’s stitching retreat, where I learned to sew a box; another was an online class from Elegant Needle where I made a square standup. Much better, no sewing. One day I’m going to really figure out my sewing machine and finish the ornaments I have hanging in the closet. There must be about 20. With the dozens of perforated paper Santas I have, that’d be one helluva tree.

Jesus loves me, this I know, because my cross-stitch tells me so.

I’ll admit I do lots of Christmas-oriented stitching: Santa ornaments, angels, that kind of stuff. But I’m a bit put off by some of the more religious aspects of stitching, being a profound atheist. Why do magazines and books seem to contain so many references to the Christian god? JCS has a psalm on the index page. Leisure Arts stuff does too. Is cross-stitch perceived as particularly Christian because of all the crosses? So much Jesus because Hoffman Media and Leisure Arts publish in the south? Is this another reason we should have allowed them to secede from the Union? I know there are Jewish stitchers out there—Pomegranate Guild most prominently. Are these Southern stitching sources being deliberately exclusionary? When’s the last time you saw a little Hebrew in the fine print?

I remember being at some market or other where there was a whole booth dedicated to these horrible Jesus “samplers.” My favorite, though not particularly religious, said, “A house without a mother is not a home.” Take that all you orphans!

I’m not knocking religious stitching. Maybe a little. What I do have a problem with are magazines on a secular subject pushing their religiosity on the rest of us in the guise of a little prayer. Don’t the people who want that have Bibles in their homes?

What are we: morons performing brain surgery?

Can someone tell me why Just Cross Stitch continues to print Martha Beth Lewis’s bloated articles? A dissertation on finding the center of fabric with a coda about using Bent Creek’s or Twisted Threads’s three inch squares so you can start in the lower left or upper right corners… A Dickensian novel on replacing threads… Way too much about putting a needle into a hole in fabric... A Dummies manual on making an x...

I don’t mean to suggest that there is nothing complicated about counted thread work, no matter what the needlepointers say, especially when you consider that so many of the more interesting patterns that are coming out these days include several stitches. Beats the hell out of paint-by-numbers that’s involved in most needlepoint. How many people actually do a pattern the way it’s printed? Do we really need Ms Lewis explaining every step to us? Could she be more condescending?

Take the most recent article—the article on substituting threads. Pages and pages dedicated to considering what color to use, how thick the floss should be, what the luster will add to the mix. Any stitcher who doesn’t know that you should use flosses of equivalent thicknesses on fabric (or change the fabric, duh) ought to have her scissors taken away from her.

But in the end, I read them all—every word. It’s like watching a car crash. But when, oh when, will we get those pages back? Pages for designs, pages that interest even a smattering of the readership.

Next up: what’s the deal with Jesus?

uppity stitchers, unite!

Here I am out of the stitching closet and bitching for the world. Despite much research, I haven't found any blogs by crafters-who-use-needles-with-eyes that does what the knitting curmudgeon does for no-eye-needleworkers. So I figured if I come out, you'll find me and I'll find you back.

I've been stitching since 1989 when my friend MB got married. I did a wedding sampler out of BH&G's America's Best Needlework. It said to stitch with one strand of floss over one on 22-count fabric. So I did. The original sampler has been relegated due to a much-needed divorce, but I've continued to stitch. Even wedding samplers because of the thirteen that I have done, only two are no longer in circulation. Most people have the decency to stay married for the sake of my cross-stitch.

I taught myself most of what I know, and the stuff I wanted to try out I did in needlework classes at the old Spirit of Cross-Stitch Festivals: cutwork, hardanger, lacis and silk gauze most notably. Despite the fact that Maureen Appleton assured me and dozens of others that we would love working on gauze, I didn't like it which saved an investment in a dazor lamp. By the demise of Spirit, they considered me an advanced stitcher. In 1998, I went to Poland to teach ESL and the "extracurricular" activity that I taught was stitching. Taught a bunch of novices a design that Sue Stokes of the Nutmeg Needle had donated. That was fun.

I'm not so interested in CATS or other classes anymore. I'm interested in stitching patterns I like, and the stuff that CATS and EGA do isn't attractive. I mean the EGA stuff, gack, who's designing this crap and when will they leave the 70s and join the rest of us? What do people do with this shit? Hang it on their walls? Impose it on their friends? Is it art?

But then, how much can you expect when the "industry-leading" magazine doesn't even fact check their stories.