Old Teachers and Crewel

My first teacher in embroidery was an anonymous instructor at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, CO. Well, she probably was not anonymous to her self, but I cannot remember anything about her except that she was a she. I was put into the class as a substitute for another class I had enrolled in that didn’t make the numbers. The class was a revelation to me and opened up to me the rest of my life. It was a needlepoint class that lasted six or eight weeks. We were to make a tote bag out of the embroidered canvas after we were done. Mine never got that far. As I remember it, we stitched on a rectangle of canvas--it must have been 13 count--that was about 20” X 12”. It had ten panels on it for the various stitches. Mine was in reds and blues. I was thrilled with it. And I was very good at it. Unfortunately that piece was used by a cat as a scratching post. The cat was Genghis Poosey, intrepid hunter, bon vivant, and seasoned traveler. That was in 1976.

The next year we moved to New Jersey. But in the meantime I started designing my own work and had done a couple of small canvases and a rug, plus I had taken my first step into blackwork. In New Jersey I had the great good luck to find the Embroiderers’ Guild in the Creative Needlework Chapter. We met evenings once a month in a church basement in Collingswood. In NJ right there, all the towns are contiguous with only the name change of the main roads to tell you which one you were in. I doubt that Collingswood was twenty minutes on a bad traffic day from my house in Cherry Hill. It was a newer chapter--they all were back then--with young women as eager as I to learn everything we could. The chapter members taught me a lot, were very encouraging, and made me want to stretch to gain their respect.

One of the first teachers I had whose name I remember was Betsy Lieper. She was an itinerant crewel teacher from New Hampshire. Every month she got in her VW Microbus and made a two week teaching circuit with Merchantville, NJ as her most southern stop. I had never done crewel and in fact had only dabbled at surface work; as I said, needlepoint, a counted work, was my forte. She had us all work on a large piece of twill with what I now know was a Jacobean-inspired design. We worked in Elsa Williams wool yarn. I was surprised at how good I was at it. So was everyone else, surprised, I mean. I was especially good at French knots and satin stitch. She taught us about a dozen different stitches, including long and short and shading. I knew crewel wasn’t for me, but I was glad to learn to do it. The way I learned it and the design I learned it on were way too staid and old-fashioned for me. I love crewel and its fascinating stitches, but to this day it is not something I do in its classic form.

Why am I remembering this and telling it now? Tomorrow is a stitch-in for Sandia Mountains Chapter and I have been asked by a member to show her how to do crewel. I am more than happy to do that and to pass on what Betsy so lovingly gave to me those thirty-odd years ago--a passion for the stitch.