CO, NJ, & NM

Yesterday I gave an hour's talk to a local PEO group of about twenty women. The talk was about blackwork--I talked about the earliest types of blackwork and showed the most contemporary of blackwork through my own work. It was a lot of fun for me, even though it was a spur of the moment thing. I had been asked to do this about six months ago, but through mishap didn't get the date written down. I was given about twelve hours notice that the talk was the next morning. Not to worry--I can always talk about blackwork.

Blackwork Butterfly

after a motif from an Elizabethan sleeve

Jane Moses was the person who invited me to talk. She helped me along with several good comments and she even brought a piece of her own to show. The audience was receptive, lively, full of questions, and very appreciative. It was the best of teaching positions to be in.


Through hubris I started teaching needlework about six months after I started to learn it in 1976. I felt compelled, like a new convert, to tell the good news and scatter this wonder through the population. I feel that I was good at teaching, if not as knowledgeable as I should have been. My first classes were with two or three women around a kitchen table with hand-written, hand-colored instructions and illustrations of canvas work. This was before my introduction to the EGA, and when we were still in Littleton where I had basically lived all of my life.

It was in 1978 when my husband got a new job in Cherry Hill, NJ and we moved away from Colorado and the peregrinations of our married life stated. It was in NJ where I met the EGA later that same year. Also in NJ I "turned professional" four years later and started making a career of teaching within the EGA.


To me teaching is the most satisfying of all that I do. It gives me what I am looking for way down deep. What is that thing I want? I have little idea up here on the surface. The best part of teaching, though, is the ability to impinge upon people's lives in little ways and in big ways. I feel that I am a catalyst that can bring about change within a person.

My being a catalyst for change seems to happen mostly when I teach color and design. Many times, after a two-day or after my massive four-day classes, I have people come up to me to tell me that I have changed the way they look at color, or art, or embroidery. They tell me, they will never again feel they are strangers to design theory or feel uncomfortable with color. It is those moments that fill me with the bliss of my calling as a teacher.

Even in the hour with the PEO in the living room of a woman here in Albuquerque, I get that same sort of pleasure and contentment from a simple thing--standing up in front of people telling them of my love and life with blackwork or color theory or design theory or Hardanger. It is, of course, what I live for.