Just Cross Stitch Wants You!

Changes are on the way at Just Cross-Stitch. The new editor wants our opinions. Go. Take the survey. Tell them; please, tell them. I beg you!

From what I remember when I browsed the magazine in the newsstand, they are relocating JCS operations. The editor, Lorna Reeves, doesn't want to move. She's going to be taking over another magazine. With any luck she'll take Martha Bloat Lewis with her.

SBQ: Fabric storage

Since I am one of the people who contributed to this week's SBQ, I really don't have much to say. My fabric pieces are stored much like my overdyed flosses. Except they're not in ziploc gallon bags. They're in a big rubbermaid tub. They're only labeled if they are still in the original packages.

But did you see the most recent JCS? Martha Beth Lewis, the woman I love to hate, has an article--two parts, of course!--on stash storage. This month focuses on threads and fabric. (Next we turn to charts, tools, and kits.) So does she do her usual bloated best to inflate the section on fabric storage that I really want to know about? No. No, of course not.

She writes about two hundred words that amount to:

• Try not to fold it
• Iron it before you put it away
• Sort it the way you browse it
• Sew a piece of paper with thread count and color name on the fabric
• Put it under the bed

Gee thanks. Sort it the way you browse it. I would have never thought of organizing things by thinking about how I use them. Two hundred words! There's a whole sidebar on how to wind a bobbin--I kid you not. Over two pages dedicated to storing floss. But the best she can do on fabric storage is to tell me to put it under the bed? Oh for the love of Christ. Somebody blow up Hoffman Headquarters.

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?