SBQ: Daddy

This month's SBQ, focuses on dear old dad.

Tell us about something that you have stitched or plan to stitch for any father in your life. Maybe it’s for your father, your father-in-law, your children’s father, your grandfather, your godfather, or someone who was or still is an important father-figure in your life. Why did you choose this particular piece of stitching? Tell us the story behind it.

Often times we identify our love of needlework and our skills with our mothers or grandmothers or other women. It’s understandable because often they were are first teachers or role models. Now let’s think about our stitching life as it relates to our dads. Is there anything about our approach to stitching that we can recognize as traits of our fathers? For instance, does your dad (or any other important man in your life) have an approach to one of his interests that you can observe and think, “Hey….if I substitute the word “needlework” for “fly fishing”, we’d be pretty darn similar!” So tell us about it. (That's me and dad in Canada in the 70s.)

The first thing I ever stitched for my dad was this Sue Hillis design of our home state. You may notice the little green bottles at Nashua and Keene. My dad was a beer wholesaler and his warehouses were located there. Clever, huh? This may have been my first major pattern alteration because I had only been stitching for two years when I did this.

I also made Dimples Design's Legends of the Silver Screen, Marilyn Monroe. It's just her eyes, and I did it because my father is a huge fan of Marilyn Monroe. He has a lot of photos and paintings featuring her. I gave it to him at Christmas, and he had no idea who it was. All of Nolan's eyes are completely recognizable.

When I was growing up, my dad's catch phrase was "No sweat." I think that I approach cross stitch that way, nothing is too difficult or complicated to take on. He also used to (may still, not sure) reload his own ammunition. And I think in a lot of ways that is like cross-stitch in that it is also an exacting but repetitious endeavor.

Here we are up at L.L. Bean's fly fishing school, speaking of fly fishing. We learned to tie flies up there, which is a similar craft.