The Yarn Harlot often says exactly what I'm feeling. Since she's a knitter, I occasionally find this odd. I don't knit, you know. I know how, but I don't much enjoy it. However, when you think about it, needlepoint and knitting are needlework, and we practitioners of these things have a lot in common, even if I can't wear my needlepoint on my feet--unless I do needlepoint slippers which I have decided I will avoid since I'd be too frightened to actually *wear* the things.
Come to think about it, how on earth do knitters talk themselves into wearing works of art like these?
http://mimoknits.typepad.com/knitting/2006/09/sock_season_soo.html
Back to what the Yarn Harlot was saying. Go read her blog and then come back. I'll wait. I need to do some more tent stitches on Holi's background anyway....
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2009/04/04/the_opposite_of_alert.html
Back already? Gosh, I thought I'd get more done. You were fast! (Or I am a slow stitcher. LOL)
The Yarn Harlot describes our situation as needlepointers pretty well, doesn't she? We live in a place and time that doesn't value hand work. The only place we can go to find someone who really understands us is gatherings of other needlepointers, folks who know us, admire our work, understand the problems we've overcome and applaud us for it. But the yearly ANG Seminar isn't always close by, guild meetings are often at bad times for us, and even getting to a good shop isn't always easy. Thank God for the Internet.
If you belong to the ANG email list, if you have a favorite online shop that helps you out whenever you call or email, if you've taken a cyberclass or used the free charts and stitches available at various sites, well, you know the power of the Internet to fuel our creativity and our needlepoint. It's how we overcome the distance and loneliness and find folks like us.
It's how we all ended up here.
So the next time you visit your favorite blogs to enjoy the stitching of friends you have never met and maybe never will, the next time you place an email order for that canvas you have lusted for that is on sale at a shop a thousand miles from you, the next time a friend in another country sends you some local threads and you reciprocate, the next time you learn about new threads or designers or shops, think of how much the Internet has enriched your stitching life.
I'm grateful. I just hope that somewhere someone is capturing all this web NP for posterity. Or in 200 years folks will be piecing together the story of needlepoint in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries and they won't know who we were.
But our needlepoint will speak for us. So do the best you can. It's history you are stitching. Our history.
Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
7 comments:
Applause! Applause!
Thanks, Donna. Make something for history today!
Amen, Jane!
So true Jane! I loved my stitching retreat I took a few weeks ago. I stitched all weekend and yet, when I was done, it did not look like much. But all the ladies there knew the work involved. Validation. That is something we share when we send a well done to a post on a finished project.
Well said Jane and Yarn Harlot! I work in a museum and we have a mug in our museum shop that says "Well behaved women rarely make history". So ladies, I challenge us all to misbehave, stitch alot, enjoy the fellowship that we find with the blogs and let's make some needlepoint history of our own!
I felt exactly the same way as you Jane after reading the Yarn Harlot's post. It is such a novelty to get together with other stitchers who completely understand why you do what you do. Who don't bat an eyelash at that pattern or canvas you *had* to buy (despite the 3,000,000 others waiting at home), who don't wonder why you'd spend so much money to spend so many days with like minded folks.
I'm off to work on my own bit of handwork history - although maybe I should feed the natives, erm, family first!
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