A Fiber Fiend's New Discovery

As a second generation crewel stitcher, I have always taken my mother's lead in all that I do. She was after all my instructor and mentor. So, I have always used Appleton Crewel for my thread. Always. I have boxes and boxes of almost every color, in small skeins and large hanks.

While doing my research into Elizabethan Crewel for my next piece, however, I found a new wool thread that I am very excited about (new to me, I'm sure others are well aware of it and would say "well, duh, you didn't know about THAT?") It is Renaissance Dyeing in France, specializing in 100% merino lambs-wool hand dyed using historically accurate recipes. They have a line called "Elizabethan Range: 16th Century Recipes" The instructions for my project state that color selection should be "historically appropriate to the period" (or something like that) so of course I had to order it!

My package arrived the other day. Here they are!

Now, I realize that a package containing 25 or so skeins of wool of various colors is probably not very exciting to most people, but I am thrilled. The colors are so warm and soft and perfectly complimenting each other. The fiber is soft and delicate. I have a feeling it will take me some time to get used to it as it's much more refined than Appleton, but I'm looking forward to that challenge. I feel like I'm striking off on a journey of independence.

Is anyone else fascinated with fiber? I love going to yarn shops just to see and feel all the different fibers available. Am I weird, or are there others out there who share my fascination with the ancient art of spinning something useful out of the natural coats of animals?

I sure hope I'm not just weird!

A Place in History?

Today, I am sitting with my foot elevated to relieve swelling and lessen the negative impacts of having a 1200 lb horse stomp on my foot. Given my confinement, I have pushed forward with reading historical accounts of embroiderers and the evolution of crewel design, in preparation for Step #5 of the Master Craftsman program (more about Step #4 later!) I have been studying Crewel Embroidery in England by Joan Edwards, (copyright 1975, William Morrow & Co. Inc. New York) and came to the Epilogue. The author's words closing her book were personally meaningful, as we look at my Mother's needlework and determine its dispersal to various family members, even while I continue to create more pieces myself. I wanted to quote the work here:

"From time to time there come to every embroiderer moments of the purest possible pleasure. The particular piece of work on which she has been engaged is finished. She removes it from the frame and spreads it out between her hands, examining every detail with minute attention. It is as though she is seeing it for the first time. Out of her own skill, initiative, and invention she has created something that pleases her. Briefly she allows herself to savour her sense of satisfaction and fulfilment.

Maybe, she concedes, it is not of quite such surpassing excellence as she had hoped to achieve when she made the design, chose the threads, and decided exactly where to place the first stitch, but on balance as good as or even a little better than her previous work.

Will anybody else, she wonders, realise how much thought and care has gone into it? Will it by some happy chance be miraculously preserved, forgotten but not destroyed, eventually to become a treasured family heirloom, and even perhaps to find its way into a great museum, where scholars will document it and embroiderers study it as an interesting example of 'historical' needlework? Surely, she reflects, it is not asking very much to be remembered as a woman who was clever with her needle.

Even as she plays fondly with her pipe dreams, she knows in her heart that its chances of survival are minimal; that although it is here today, pretty, fresh, and colourful, by tomorrow it will be faded and grubby, the threads worn and the colours faded; and that because the present sets very little store by its immediate past, the next generation is as likely to destroy as to cherish it. Perhaps she will comfort herself with the thought that, like a garden, much of embroidery's charm lies in the fact that it is completely ephemeral.

But to finish one piece of work is only an excuse to begin another, the idea for which she has been turning over in her mind for a long while. She cannot wait to get on with it for she is irresistably fascinated by the art of working intricate stitches and by the variety of decorative effects she can obtain with them; by watching a design develop along the lines and in the colours she has chosen for it; and by the knotty little problems she is constantly being called upon to resolve. Absorbed in bringing into focus all her technical expertise, taste, and ingenuity, and balancing them on the point of her needle, she has neither regret nor hesitation. The past and the future may take care of themselves. Time becomes meaningless. Only the embroidery she is engaged upon at the present moment is important."