Wasatch Chapter and Certification

In 1984 our family of four was peaceably living in Cherry Hill, NJ and I was attending the Creative Needlework Chapter which met in Collingswood NJ, just a fifteen minute drive away. It was that year that Mike asked Unisys if we could transfer out west to Salt Lake City. It sounded good to me--another adventure in life. Little did I know how much that move would change my life. The Creative Needlework Chapter was a wonderful chapter. We had fabulous teachers both locally, from the other coast, and from points in between. The big needlework teachers back then just itched to come to the east coast around NYC to teach and make their reputations. I had been teaching professionally for about two years and had even taught at one National Seminar--I had gotten a taste of what could be. But I was a mountain-west girl. I longed for open space and open skies that were bright blue.

We moved to a nice house on the side of a mountain in Sandy, Utah. I put PJ in the local high school and found a preschool for Barrett, then went looking for the local shops and EGA chapter. I found a mint: good shops and the Salt Lake Needlepoint Chapter. This was early in 1985 (we had moved over Christmas) and I was an ambitious stitcher. I thought I could fit right in to the local groups and get on with stitching. But I was wrong. Salt Lake had a different way of doing things, both the city and the chapter.

The move to Utah was just as hard as the move to NJ, culture shock, a different way of doing things, outsiders were not always welcomed with open arms. And I must admit as I look back, I had an attitude. I had just started the process of EGA National Teacher Certification and so was pretty full of myself. I was just in from the east coast, had lived within that magic circle of EGA that surrounded the then-national headquarters in New York City. I was certainly god's gift to SLCNC.

Well, there was more to this than just my attitude. The SLCNC was operating under two charters--one from EGA and one from ANG. A thing specifically forbidden by both national organizations because of the complications with the money and the IRS. But in Salt Lake City things were done differently, as I have mentioned before. Instead of being a sweet team player and just attending meetings, I turned activist. There was a powerful clique running the chapter. It was those four or five who held the offices and made the decisions about who would teach, what would be taught, how we spent the money, etc. One lovely spring afternoon, I gave fair warning to the ringleader and told her I was going to write national EGA about this whole mess.

At the next meeting of the chapter, it was announced that SLCNC was giving up the EGA charter and swinging wholly over to the American Needlepoint Guild. I had two friends to whom I had already talked, Sherry Gates and Mary Repola. At that meeting, I stood up and announced that we three were starting a new EGA chapter that would start meeting informally right away. The deed was done and I did not ever write to national about the charters.

Both Mary and Sherry moved out of Utah before the new chapter formally began, so I started Wasatch Chapter of the EGA on my own. We first met in January, I believe, of 1986 with enough members for a president (me), a program chair and vice-president, a secretary-treasurer, and a newsletter person. There were about ten of us in all. We were off and running.

Meanwhile I was having other problems. I was struggling with the certification process. This was supposed to take from one year to eighteen months. It was a series of six parts that had to be passed satisfactorily. I was a good teacher, I knew that. But I couldn't seem to please the east coast certification group with my embroideries. I had to do nine of them in nine different techniques of counted work. As always, I did original work, some times startlingly original. And this was the problem. The Certification Committee suggested that I quit certification (I had done about half of the parts successfully) and take some time to study more about the classic way of doing the counted work. I protested vigorously and wrote a letter to Rosemary Cornelius, the head of the committee--it was not she who had suggested that I quit. I told her that I knew I could pass this, that all she had to do was to send me detailed instructions for exactly what they wanted for each embroidery.

Rosemary was a wonder. She told me that from then on she was to be my mentor (before that my mentors had changed with each part) and that we would try this again. I still have the papers, the fabrics, and threads she sent me tucked away in my stash. I passed in just over eighteen months, in December of 1986 and was presented my rose in Parsippany, NJ in the fall of 1987.

It was an exciting time of life with adversity and struggles all overcome by hard work, persistence, and a little guile with the SLCNC. In 2000 after working for five years I got my second certification, my master certification with EGA: Graduate Teacher. No one questioned my original, outre embroideries then.

Just remembering this whole struggle makes me smile.