a p p a r e n t l y

The Apparently family is back online, thanks to a kind TWC repairman named Harry, and so I’m finally ready to confess a crafty secret I’ve been holding close the past few months. I’ve been dabbling in embroidery.

My mother is a champion needlepointer. The woman has spent hours stitching the most complex of canvases, from the Swan Boats in Boston’s Public Garden to intricate, fanciful vases of peonies. But apart from a few French knots, neither of us quite had the embroidery bug.

Last fall I discovered this lovely little Etsy shop, Rainburst Embroidery, and the curious little tufted pillow called a biscornu. I may have put a blackwork biscornu kit on my holiday wish list, and we’ll get back to that in a couple of posts. I had embroidery on the brain, if not in my hands.

In January, I stumbled across this book: The New Crewel: Exquisite Designs in Contemporary Embroidery. Katherine Shaughnessy has made a little craft empire out of her modern approach to crewel. The free-form nature of crewel appeals to me, as well as the fact that it’s traditionally sewn with wool on linen, and so I tried my hand at one of the New Crewel designs:

Since I’m quite drawn to spirals, I next spent a few days working on my satin stitch.

And then I tossed all the embroidery supplies into the closet, because after a week of tiny stitches my back, shoulders and eyes were sore and unforgiving. But the needle and hoop would not let me rest…

Next: In which the intrepid new embroiderer encounters Jemima Puddleduck