We had a new embroiderer on Monday. It was me! I stitched a plain, single-color leaf in #325. I chose the location carefully; there aren’t that many single leaves left; they’re one of the “training motifs” we’ve been using as first work for those new to the jacket. (The other training motif is the bud/rosehip – there are precious few of those left too.)

Carol S was surprised, when she heard, that this was the first time I’d worked on the real jacket. It wasn’t on purpose, just sort of a combination of things. In the early sessions there was a lot of organizing and other things to take care of, plus there were no free frames. Several times I worked a practice bud on a doodle cloth to warm up and get my work approved, but something else would always come up that I needed to do. Then, after a little while, the idea of starting on the real piece began to loom like a mountain in my imagination. The last thought stalling me was that it would be so fun that I would be tempted to work on it as much as possible, and there really is an awful lot of other stuff that has to get done too.

The other day I decided it was time. I picked carefully – this leaf will be under the collar when the jacket is finished – just in case my work wasn’t up to snuff. But it actually went very well. And I think I was right – it will be hard to ignore the siren call of the frames in the cupboard and make shirts, sort shoes, and organize the clothing for the March 23 opening of the museum!

I wasn’t going to mention it, but Wendy and Robbin and some of the others threatened insisted. My next project is a trefoil. There are plenty of those left.

Thanks to Wendy for these pictures.

Tags: motifs, Robbin, Wendy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.