Lucky me! I managed to talk Amy Bunger into an interview last summer. Here is what we talked about. My questions are in italics while Amy's answers are in regular text. Have fun listening to a giant in the needlepoint world talking about this and that!
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When did you start needlepointing, Amy? I started in 1988 when I wanted to have something to do with my hands in front of the tv at night. All my female relatives on both sides of my family do handwork of one kind or another. I wanted something no one else did, tried needlepoint and got hooked. What about you?
I believe my first needlepoint stitches were taken in 1961. My mother was the wife of a military officer and spent her “waiting” times doing needlepoint. She had time when he was on TDY (temporary duty), which took him away from home. By the time I was about 7 or 8 years old she started traveling with him on various assignments and the long plane trips gave her lots of time to stitch. She worked on projects of our home but mostly kneelers for the National Cathedral and the Air Force Academy chapel. My mother taught me how to do Basketweave, probably to stop my whining that I wanted to do what she was doing. I did not do much but in the early to mid 1960s I worked a small rectangle with my name on it to glue onto a basket-like purse. It was quite the rage at the time.
Needlepoint is a handwork hobby that has been passed down through the generations on my mother’s side of the family with mothers teaching daughters. I even have a few beloved pieces worked by my great grandmother and several counted embroidery samplers from family members that date back 200 years of family. The women on my father’s side of the family also did handwork but they did quilting, white work, cut work, and steel crochet.
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| Amy's 1829 Family Sampler, Stitched by Anna Spink, Aged 12 |
How did it become a career? And why did you start writing stitch guides? I think you were the first, although I did find a mention of "stitch guides" in this 1973 booklet by
Barbara Hunter. As you know, there was a huge explosion of needlepoint books in the 1970s, so it makes sense the term originated then, even if Ms. Hunter is using "stitch
guided" for what we'd call a stitch diagram today--which seems likely, although I've not bought a copy of this booklet to check.
http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com/2015/06/is-this-original-stitch-guide.html
The needlepoint hobby went dormant for me for many years during school. Other than an odd project here and there in college I really didn’t become an avid stitcher until my early 20s and then more counted cross stitch rather than needlepoint because of the cost factor. As a young wife in Nashville TN I took a secondary part-time job in evenings and weekends at Pat Embry’s shop, The Stitching Post, and probably spent every dime on supplies purchased from her shop. We moved to a smaller community in Kentucky and although I found a job
in the dental field, which is what I was doing and enjoyed in Nashville, this new position didn’t agree with me. Nice working conditions and people but not challenging enough. I had been working off of my stash from Nashville to keep up with my hobby but there was no shop in Owensboro, KY at that time. The best they had to offer was a limited supply of embroidery floss in the big box fabric store. With a lot of family encouragement from my mother, painted needlepoint canvases from my sister, Taylor, who designed and painted them, and $6000.00 my husband and I could scrape together I opened my first shop. It was mostly counted cross stitch because the needlepoint supplies were expensive even then but I had Taylor’s canvases and a full line of Paternayan yarn as my needlepoint corner.
If you start a hobby business in a small community that doesn’t have a stitching shop you discover overnight that you are now a TEACHER or you don’t have any customers. It was great. My inventory was limited but I didn’t have a lot of competition. My rent was cheap so my mistakes weren’t devastating. I was there for about 3 years and then opened a shop in Longmont CO for about a year. I was sorry to leave CO but was delighted to be moving to Memphis TN, where my sister, Candy, lives with her family. The Memphis shop, Amy’s Golden Strand, is when I started putting in needlepoint in a big way. It was a gradual process to add canvases and threads to the shop as I learned more myself. I was fortunate that there was a very active independent embroidery guild in town where I could affordably take a few classes from traveling teachers (Mary Lou Helgeson, dede Ogden, Betty Chen Louis). I would take their lessons and knowledge, then experiment with what I liked and what
I thought could happen on a needlepoint canvas. I was still teaching in my shop and started adding embellishment classes, which was my love. My Thursday night group kept me hopping for sure. I did not write guides for them but we worked each week on selecting stitches and threads for their canvases.
I have loved nutcrackers ever since we lived in Germany for a year when I was 12. Marj Hunter designed fabulous nutcrackers and sold them under the design name of Damarj. Susan Portra wrote several stitch guides for Marj’s nutcrackers and they really spoke to me.
Tony Minieri was also writing guides at that time and both of those people were true inspiration for what was to become a great career move for me.
Marj was kind enough to design the Robin Hood Nutcracker painted canvas for me to work up and use as a retreat class project. I couldn’t think of how to thank her, but offered to bring the finished projects of Robin Hood and the Vegetable Gardener Nutcracker to the Chicago TNNA market for her to display in her booth. As a shop owner I was well aware that a finished project can REALLY sell canvases better than the painted canvas unstitched. At that time you didn’t see many stitched models at the shows.
The night before market I took the designs to Marj’s room and waited for her to unwrap the frames while holding my crossed fingers behind my back. I was not-so-secretly praying that she would hire me to write stitch guides like those that Susan Portra did. Well, be careful what you wish for, my friend! While I was silently chanting a mantra in my head of “buy my guides” Marj looked up and said “You know what they are going to want, don’t you?” I was so confused (and stayed that way the rest of the weekend) that I couldn’t understand where she was going with that comment. Who was she talking about? What the heck did she mean? There was NO Marj wants anything in her question…sigh… She put me out of my muddled misery by answering her own question. “They are going to want you to come and teach of course.” I was gob smacked and still didn’t really understand it. I just wanted to write guides. I taught in my own store but that is sitting with friends, not standing up in front of strangers teaching with deadlines and a curriculum. I tend to suffer a bit from stage fright and I was hyperventilating at just the thought of teaching outside of my own shop. Marj did continue to talk and tell me that she wanted me to write guides for her canvases as well, but I am not sure I heard much of what she said at that point.
Bless her, she and several other kind and knowledgeable Queens of the industry took me carefully by the hand and lead me through a weekend of Oz-like revelations. I left that market with a sample teaching contract scribbled on a cocktail napkin by Claire March (Tapestry Tent), a guide-writing contract generously mapped out by Marj Hunter, and 3 teaching contracts, complete with deposits, for shops in Illinois, California, and Michigan. It was the beginning of a long, wonderful, exhausting, multi-leveled career of passing along the love of needlepoint to others.
You may not think your career was very inspiring, but look at all the stitch guides available today! Now the first thing folks say when they see a canvas they like is if there
is a stitch guide for it? I even was inspired to start a stitch guides blog, to try and capture as many guides as possible. These days I just post about guides that have some sort of photo of how it looks. That way folks have some idea of a stitch guide writer's taste is similar to their own.
There has always been the problem of people needing to see the finished product before investing in a guide but if I stitched the canvas I wouldn’t be able to produce the guides fast enough to fill the need. I taught for several years teaching the nutcrackers and other canvas designs that I stitched first, which gave me a photo of the finished piece to use, but everyone wanted to work on their own favorite canvas so I started offering Canvas Enhancement Classes in other shops. In the beginning I would travel to a shop and work impromptu guides for the students while in the class. That was great, but mentally exhausting, and I could tell that somewhere along the line I was going to hit a day when I just didn’t have a thought in my head. That is when I started writing complete guides that I did not stitch. The shop owner would send me the canvases ahead of the class, I would write the guide and return the canvas with the guide, and then the shop owner would pull the threads and other items needed to complete the canvas. There were a lot of adjustments to those classes over the years, tweaking them until they worked pretty well for everyone. After learning to use a graphics program the stitches weren’t much of a problem but the threads were the hardest. If I let the shop owner choose all the threads from their inventory just matching the color I would find that the student might not have a thread type that was appropriate for the stitch, or some other glitch. Selecting over-dyed threads was tough in the beginning, as many shop owners/employees didn’t know how to use them, which makes it pretty tough to pick them out.
Another problem was if I made the exact thread suggestion the shop owner might not carry that thread or couldn’t get that thread…so many issues, but it continued to morph until it worked pretty well. The guides themselves had a definite evolution as well as there were different levels of guides in my line up (class guides versus Home Study guides). I always
tried to listen to the students as well as my bosses (shop owners) and incorporate their suggestions when possible. The very early Home Study Guides were similar to my Class and Commercial Guides and a student commented (in a package she returned) that the guides were not what she would consider a home study…where was the study part? I took that to heart and started building in more and more of the lessons and general needlepoint tips and hints making them a complete class in a zippered bag. As an example of a suggestion from students that I did not follow; it was pointed out many times that they (students) wanted the stitch diagram on the same page as the detailed instructions. I never did it because I have watched (for almost 40 years) too many students see the stitch
diagram and skim the details to see what thread and then dig in, never READING the rest of the instructions. At least if the details come first and they have to hunt for the diagram, I stood a chance of them really reading what I wanted them to do with the stitch and thread. The student work-a-round was to make copies of the stitch diagrams and cut and paste them where they wanted them. I do realize that I never won that battle.
I must say that the good Lord looked out for me along every bend in my career road from opening the first shop, mapping out my teaching career, and the guide writing help was huge from my sister, Candy, and right-hand man, Jill. Between them, they corrected every sentence carefully interpreting my message so that the spelling and punctuation could be added to convey the idea correctly (English is not my strong suit). Both of them repeatedly made suggestions to improve the product (and the shop). In 2015 Jill and I even collaborated on a six-chapter mail order needlepoint college course text, which we called The Mysteries of Needlepoint. It is pretty awesome if I do say so myself but major kudos must go to Jill for her work and guidance on that project.
Which came first, the shop or the teaching? See above…shop (first shop opened in 1979), teaching (soon thereafter), guide writing (mid 1980s), finally wholesale (1999).
Needlepoint (any chosen hobby actually) can be different things to different people. Whether you want the challenge to be the best that you can be or you just want to be soothed by the feeling of pulling thread through the canvas and bask in the colors, you should truly enjoy yourself. If you aren’t having a good time, then consider another pastime.
Probably the best stitching tips I could pass along would be very basic:
1. Use a new needle/needles with each new project. Even medium-sized projects may need more than one new needle in their execution.
2. A good sharp pair of scissors are a true joy in life.
3. Check the back of your work frequently. It is truly amazing how much trouble threads can get into when you aren’t looking.
4. Figure and refigure how much thread will be needed and then buy extra. Dye lots do matter!
5. Doodle canvases are worth their weight in gold…start one and use it to try every bright idea and nagging doubt.
6. Find a stitching friend, even if long distance, to share experiences, successes, and growth. Many things in life are better when walked “together.”
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us about your career and give us tips to make our stitching better, Amy. It's much appreciated!
Amy's stitch guides and her "Cookbook" chapters plus her Home Studies are still available through Needle Works in Austen, TX. They can get you everything you'll need to study with Amy in the comfort of your own home.
https://theneedleworks.com/
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