Hand Stitching

Slogging (stitching) through Winter

Well, with Winter here, though not as bad as in the ‘old days’ when Lake Ontario always frozen over enough to drive across to Wolfe Island, and hold little festivals on the lake, adaptation is key.

One of the thing one might need to adapt to is illness and injury, which I have had to do though not dire. I had a cold before Christmas which might have lasted a whole week, but I managed to get rid of it in seven days with copious amounts of Vitamin C and other vitamins, fluids, rest, and binge watching stuff I had collected on Tivo!

Christmas (a green one) arrived and went well and we had a few flurries and cold days but on a mild day, 5˚c, walking to the Seniors Centre for my French class I turned a corner and hit the only patch of ice in the neighbourhood!!! I slammed down on my left side as my feet flew up to the right, winded and shocked I rolled around and onto my back as I assessed what had just happened. I thought that the driver of the white car coming down the street and turning the corner just feet from me would probably stop and ask if I was OK…but when I looked around they had just driven on. I guess it’s really hard to notice a woman formerly vertical and suddenly horizontal writhing in an orange coat when she is feet from you…oh well.

Nothing broken (checked out and X-rayed at the hospital) but this resulted in a lot more sitting around and binge watching Coronation Street. A pair of socks was worked on but I also found (rediscovered) an old passion…stitching!

Belonging to the Kingston Fibre Artists we have our annual show – Art Threads 2020 – and sale coming up in April and our brief this year is to cover those Chinese take out food boxes…cardboard with the wire handles. No, we haven’t been chowing down at our meetings and taking home the empties…I bought a box of them at Michaels…nice and clean. Covering and decorating them has allowed me to dig through my fabric stash and my bead collection (I used to put beads on some of my knits). I hit the book store Indigo with my friend Margot Miller who had a gift card to spend and found a lovely book of Slow Stitching.

I hit the book store Indigo with my friend Margot Miller who had a gift card to spend and found a lovely book of Slow Stitching. I was looking for a book on embroidery as I did a lot of it in my teens and twenties….but this was just what I needed/wanted. I have been fascinated by the Kantha stitching on the vintage quilts I used to make jackets…this gave me such great insight and ideas for decorating fabric and fibre items. I have a lot of vintage linens in my fabric stash so it’s lovely to now be able to dig into that stash and use them in a new way…for me anyway.

I’m loving getting back to the calm of stitching and also using my right hand more than my left. Forty some years of obsessively knitting socks by hand have taken their toll on my left hand causing pain and a strange lump…so now it gets to rest.

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