photo: jetheriot
I showed an early interest in embroidery, and my grandmother wanted to encourage me in that direction, so she gave me a sewing basket when I was seven or eight. l’d spend hours tracing nursery rhyme figures onto squares of fabric and embroidering their outlines.
She taught me how to use a thimble. She showed me how to pin a needle to the felt lining the lid of the basket so I’d always know where to find it. For the buttons on the vests of The Three Blind Mice, she taught me how to make a French knot. Then my mother would help me turn the panels into small pillows. The panels that didn't become pillows lived in the basket neatly folded, and when my passion for embroidery faded, the basket was forgotten in a closet. Thirty years later my mother gave it back to me.
Opening it was like opening a time capsule – the small mirror held to the inside of the lid with short straps of thin white elastic, the needle pinned to the magenta felt lining, coils of pink and green embroidery floss, a thimble, a stack of fabric panels. Humpty Dumpty on a light blue satin rectangle, half-embroidered in rainbow colors; Mary, Mary Quite Contrary painted with fabric markers; the Queen of Hearts; Jack and Jill; each layer was a memory I unfolded. And at the bottom of the basket, buried under the pile of panels, was a single folded sheet of loose leaf paper.
I unfolded it. It was a crayon sketch of a horse I'd drawn when I was five or six. I knew how old I was when I drew it because my mother had written my name and the date at the bottom of the page in black crayon: Jude - '79. The horse – round, brown, cartoon-like – floating in the center of the page, a black dot for an eye, a black arc for his mane, a thicker black arc for his tail. Thirty years after burying him, I brought him back to life. I framed him and named him Poo-tail.
She taught me how to use a thimble. She showed me how to pin a needle to the felt lining the lid of the basket so I’d always know where to find it. For the buttons on the vests of The Three Blind Mice, she taught me how to make a French knot. Then my mother would help me turn the panels into small pillows. The panels that didn't become pillows lived in the basket neatly folded, and when my passion for embroidery faded, the basket was forgotten in a closet. Thirty years later my mother gave it back to me.
Opening it was like opening a time capsule – the small mirror held to the inside of the lid with short straps of thin white elastic, the needle pinned to the magenta felt lining, coils of pink and green embroidery floss, a thimble, a stack of fabric panels. Humpty Dumpty on a light blue satin rectangle, half-embroidered in rainbow colors; Mary, Mary Quite Contrary painted with fabric markers; the Queen of Hearts; Jack and Jill; each layer was a memory I unfolded. And at the bottom of the basket, buried under the pile of panels, was a single folded sheet of loose leaf paper.
I unfolded it. It was a crayon sketch of a horse I'd drawn when I was five or six. I knew how old I was when I drew it because my mother had written my name and the date at the bottom of the page in black crayon: Jude - '79. The horse – round, brown, cartoon-like – floating in the center of the page, a black dot for an eye, a black arc for his mane, a thicker black arc for his tail. Thirty years after burying him, I brought him back to life. I framed him and named him Poo-tail.