The Sacred Stitch and Carnegie Hall

Earlier this week I was sitting and stitching with a group of friends. One of my friends, Addy, was learning some particularly finicky whitework fillings. She looked up from her work that she had been swearing at (I stitch with a rough group of women!) and said that her teacher had told them to use a doodle cloth to learn the stitches before putting them into the sampler. But Addy said that she never did doodle cloths and rarely practiced.

I should have been shocked and amazed at this statement, but I am not. I have known a lot of stitchers who do not practice on a doodle cloth, but who go right to the good piece. And confessorily, I have been known to do it myself. On the other hand, I have a dozen notebooks and a couple of storage bins that are filled with bits and pieces of practice pieces. I like to practice and to get it right. I don't want to take the moral high ground here, but I think even the most accomplished star of embroidery must practice.

So I asked Addy why she didn't work first on a doodle cloth. She said that she didn't want to waste any of her work. That she put a lot of effort into the stitches and she didn't like to see any trashed at the end. I didn't explain to her about my dozen notebooks and my two storage bins, because I know what she is talking about. When I started out in this medium, I wanted everything I did to count. I wanted everything I did to be perfect the first time. Amazingly, a lot of the stuff I did looked pretty good, so I was happy.

Then I started to be ambitious and decided to go for teacher certification in counted work from EGA. It was rough and at one point the certification committee asked me if I didn't want to quit and try again when I was more experienced. Well, no, I didn't want to quit, I knew I could do whatever they required of me. So a great lady, Rosemary Cornelius, stepped in and offered to help me out. Part of the problem was that I was living in Sandy, Utah at the time and was quite isolated from the certification committee who lived no further west than Philadelphia. The only access I had to them was by telephone and correspondence.

So Rosemary started mentoring me. She sent me a dozen small stitched examples on a dozen different fabrics to show me what was what. It was then I realized that even the best needlewomen practiced; that even I should practice. I made it through certification within two years (at that time, that was as long as it could take) and my work started to attract attention. The one good thing about not being in the pocket of the East Coast was that my work was fundamentally different.

So why The Sacred Stitch? I have learned that not everything that comes from my needle is a world statement and has to be saved. Even if things look good at first glance doesn't mean it can't be improved with practice. Now when I do mixed media embroidery for exhibit and for sale, the stitches aren't the calm, pristine things to be looked at and admired. The stitches are the building blocks of the whole piece. The stitches aren't as important as the finished whole. I can make a dozen perfect dove's eyes and then paint over them or melt nylon over them. But I do know how to make perfect dove's eyes because I practiced.

A man in the back of a limo had his driver stop on a street corner in New York. He rolled down his window and asked a passerby how to get to Carnegie Hall. The man looked at the limo and thought for a few seconds and then said, "Practice, practice, practice."