Early this week, I had a really fun, fun chat with Sue Weeks over on Stitchery Stories! Stitchery Stories is … Continue reading Let’s Go Chat on Stitchery Stories! and Other News…

Good morning and happy Monday! It’s a bleak and rimy day here in Kansas, with a bit of a winter storm going on. In short, it’s a perfect indoor day!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been digging about online for old embroidery inspiration, concentrating mostly on early 19th century and before. It’s really unbelievable how much information about early textiles is available online, right at our fingertips, through vast collections of old print material, made digital.

It’s a blessing… and a curse. It’s a blessing, because – wow! We can learn so much and see so much that we otherwise would never see!

It’s a curse, because… well, I call them rabbit holes. Once you head down them, it’s easy to go farther and farther and farther, and it’s hard to crawl back out.

But these online collections are such a good source of inspiration for embroidery and other forms of needlework. So I’d say they’re much more of a blessing than a curse, don’t you think?

Every year, I have this idea that January will be a quiet, calm, peaceful month. After all (at least in Kansas), it’s usually the doldrums – that part of winter that’s just gray and cold and not much is going on. It’s a good time to reflect, to calmly approach the year, to get one’s proverbial ducks all lined up.

But it never actually works that way. I think it’s a matter of ideas boiling over and that feeling that it’s time to act on all of them. Then, of course, I get into a bit of a frenzy, with loose ends going everywhere, and I find by the second half of January, I’m desperately trying to evaluate where I am and where I’m going. I have to slow things down, prioritize, organize, think things out.

And by the end of January, I generally feel a little more together.

This happens every year.

Today, I thought I’d share an embroidery hodgepodge with you. This mix represents a little bit of where I am and where I’m going right now and then heading into the next couple months. I’m at that point where I’ve put the brakes on and I’m prioritizing and working in a more systematic way to get things together! There’s no particular order to this particular hodgepodge.

I suppose that’s what makes it a hodgepodge.

We’re revisiting the topic of the ‘umble needle today – that little tiny, but mighty, little tool.

Truly, it’s the only tool that those of us into needlework really couldn’t do without.

Imagine if needles disappeared. Poof! No more needles!

It would be hard to indulge in this art that means so much to us, wouldn’t it? Sure, we could figure out how to make one to get by, but … it wouldn’t quite be the same. I want to be embroiderer, anyway – I don’t want to be a needle manufacturer!

So now and then, I like to talk about needles. I have a healthy respect for them, for many reasons. Today, I’ll recap some information on different types of needles and how to identify them, give some suggestions for organization, and to top it off, I’ll share a little morality tale with you.