Emma is home for the holidays, bringing energy, humor, and ambitious gift-making plans. Among these, needlepoint! Who would have guessed?
If you know me, you know I am passionate about needlepoint. I have created three needlepoint pieces of my own design, each one taking years to complete. I have no idea whether they are works of folk art of pieces of crap, but the process of designing and executing them is absorbing. Captivating. Consuming.
Obsessive.
I have been working with needles my entire life. I had a host of knitting-needle wielding Scottish great aunts with names like May and Nettie and Bessie and Euphamia, who knitted their own socks and underwear and who knitted us mittens in the shape of skunks that were connected with a long single-stitch string that connected the pair through the sleeves of our winter coats, so the mittens never got lost. They knitted us sweaters that were too small, so my brother always got mine, and I always got my sister's, and she never got a hand-knit sweater at all. My great-grandmother taught me to knit before I was old enough to go to school. By high school, I could knit a sweater without looking at my hands, while studying American history or reading novels.
I'm a knitting machine. I have no doubt I could knit a scarf or a sweater in fifteen minutes. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the point. For whatever reason, though, I completely lost interest in knitting after college.
So when my sister handed down a boatload of wool needlepoint yarn and a half-dozen canvasses - some of them blank - it lit me up like a bonfire on a dry fall day. She had gotten these from her mother-in-law, Suzanne, and thought I might be interested. And I was. Yes, I was. It was the blank canvas that did it. With needlepoint, I'm actually designing the piece, not just crafting somebody else's design. It's creating, like writing a story or creating a harmony. It's pulling out a piece of yourself and putting it out there, into the world. It's not the product, it's the process, though. Once finished, I have no interest. But while I'm creating: wow.
Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you, Suzanne.
Because I love it so much, I never intend to get rid of any of my needlepoint stuff, at least not until I've gone totally blind (I'm halfway there), or my hands become so painful I can't grip the needle (25% of the way). But right now, I'm sitting on the coach next to Emma Jane, who's surrounded with the graph paper on which she designed her Once Upon a Time original needlepoint art, and who has been working assiduously for almost two hours, and who has completed approximately two-square inches of canvas, and who keeps holding her piece up every time she completes a thread, saying "Do you think it's cute, Mom?" Or, "Does it look like a face, Mom?" Or, "Do you think I should add an extra row here, Mom?" Because, I'm writing this blog, and only half paying attention.
But still. Who'da thought?
She's welcome to all the needles and thread she can use.
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