Five Years

Whoa, Nelly.
I'm taking a little breather at work. Literally. I had to interview a pair of docs today who run the anatomy lab. In their office. In the anatomy lab. They didn't tell me that. So I was riding up the escalator and thinking to myself, "something smells funny." Well, yeah. Then a guy wheels a gurney with a black bag by me. I kept thinking, make sure you're still hearing things; if you stop, you're going to faint. But I didn't. Still an hour of breathing formadelhyde is about fifty minutes too many. I need to breathe.

Five Years
This month, I will celebrate five years of blogging. I started blogging when it was just coming in to wider use in academia. My boss at the oru wanted to put a blog on the website. I don't know why I resisted; it probably sounded too trendy. I was reading Knitting Curmudgeon, and I started wondering if there were blogging stitchers. I asked my boss and my friend who was then blogging about his heart condition on Live Journal to tell me if they came across any stitching blogs. If there were any, none of us could find them. So I just started writing on August 21, 2003. I don't even know if anyone was reading--no comments back in the dark ages. I just kept writing into the ether. Soon, I started finding more and more stitching bloggers. And what a community it is! Eventually, there got to be so many stitching blogs I no longer felt obliged to read them all, well, not all the time.

Radical Change of Blog Policy
To celebrate this momentous anniversary, for the next year, I will be having a giveaway on the 21st of each month. Prizes will range from things stitched or sewn or crafted by me to things I buy. Because, let's face it...in the last five years I haven't really impressed you with my abilities to finish what I start. To win, comment on the anniversary post; I'll label it. Using a random number generator, I'll draw the winner on the 21st. I'll ship gifts worldwide because now I have stitching friends the world over. It's a good thing.

Thanks for reading!

SBQ: The Bitch who Stitches

SBQ: How did you decide on the title of your stitching blog? Was it random, or does it have a special meaning to you or about you?

There was this wedding sampler I was stitching for my cousin, bride and groom standing at the edge of a wood surrounded by bushes. Every single stitch in those bushes was a different color. Hundreds of blended needles. I could hardly stitch for the complaining I did. I mostly got through it because a group of us stitched together semi-regularly. Whenever I took it out, they'd say, "here comes the stitch and bitch." In fact, we decided when we opened our stitching store cum bookstore cum coffee shop (no coffee in the stitching area) that we'd call it "Stitch and Bitch." This was before Debbie Stoller took the name for her own, of course.

When I imagined my blog, there were no stitching bloggers (that I had yet found) and I took as my inspiration the Knitting Curmudgeon. Like her, I hated when newbies-who-didn't-know-enough-to-realize-there-was-life-beyond_________ (aida in this case), took over interesting places. I was on rctn in nineteen-dickety-two when there were about 50 posts a week. Fifty intelligent and interesting on topic posts. Then something happened (I blame AOL and compuserve for releasing idiots the ill-prepared into the wilds of the internet). And then there were thousands of posts many of them on homeschooling, dying relatives that needed praying for, and how great Precious Moments kits were. It made me bitchier. And I thought this blogging-thing would give me a chance to unleash my ranting without having to actually read what those others were saying. So I was going to bitch...and the stitch and bitch thing came back to me. (The Knitting Curmudgeon has a lot more fortitude than I do because she continues to read those boards, at least every now and then, for fodder. I can't make myself. Who really cares if Jim-what's-his-name is stitching nude women--it's neither cute nor offensive.)

All this said, with the exception of my rants concerning Martha Beth Lewis, I actually find it hard to sustain the attitude I had set out to share. When I'm saying mean things to people I know, it's easy to know how far I can go. When I'm saying them in person to people I don't know, same thing--you stop when people recoil...or maybe just one more jab and then you stop. Out here, people are kind of thin-skinned. And it's hard to know when I've gone too far. OTOH, I'm not called the Stitch Bitch for nothing: WYSIWYG.

Recently I met people who I didn't know who also read the blog. Suddenly, I was horrified. I had said, things, and there were these people...Reading Them. And here I was talking to them. What had I said that they would remember; had I embarrassed myself? the poor dude? It's completely counterintuitive, but I like you all a whole lot better in the abstract than when you are shaking my hand. (Oh, it was a pleasure to meet you all, btw!)

If you're asking why I use a nom de blog, that's a whole other story.

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.