Indulge

If I have to spend time in an airport, one of my favorite things to do is browse the bookstore.  On my latest trip, I spotted a book about choosing a word to guide your life for a year.  If I had to choose one word right now as it applys to my stitching life, it would certainly be "indulge" as that's what I've been doing during the last month.

It all started with a trip to Jacksonville to take a class from Ellen Chester.  The Lady's Worke Box is a lovely piece and I have made some progress on the needlebook beyond what we did in class.  What a fun weekend it was!  The setting at the Riverdale Inn in the historic district of Jacksonville was beautiful.  The weather was fantastic and I enjoyed a morning walk with views of the St. John's River.  Pansies were blooming!  In February!  Best of all, I got to meet people who I have known on-line for many years.  Melody  did a fabulous job organizing everything and the day of the class went so smoothly.  She's a great tour guide as well and pointed out lots of sights in the historic district.  Seeing her office in a prairie style building was a real highlight.  I sat across from Jackie and Theresa during the class.  It turns out that Jackie and I have 23 year old sons who were born just a few weeks apart.  Theresa graciously lent me her tape measure since I had neglected to put mine in my stitching bag.  We also had conversations there and at dinner about stitching retreats and classes.  It was just a lot of fun and a great memory!

The next weekend, I indulged in another stitching related adventure.  My husband and I went to Washington, D.C. for the weekend so that we could visit an exhibit at the National Gallery and go to Woodlawn in Alexandria to see the annual needlework show.  The exhibit at the National Gallery was of pre-Raphaelite painters and I confess that I was uninformed about them prior to our trip.  Now I know that William Morris was included in the group and there were a few of his tapestries and embroideries at the end of the exhibit.  One beautiful painting by another artist in the group (I neglected to write down the name) was of a mother and daughter.  I spotted a lady's worke box in the corner of the painting!  Woodlawn was fun and as always, there was some amazing stitching.  I didn't feel that there were as many entries as in the past, but the catalog listed over 700.  I think that there are more smalls now that when I first saw the show five or six years ago.  It was great to see the members of my guild, the Delaware Valley Historical Sampler Guild, do so well in the show.

And that brings me to the last bit of indulging in stitching.  Last week's program for the DVHSG was to bring in the earliest piece of stitching we had and talk a bit about how we started stitching.  So many people had similar stories of mothers, grandmothers or aunts passing down their love of needlework.  Of course, our tastes, interests and skill levels have evolved and improved since our first attempts at needlework and that was fun to see as well.

As for actual stitching--well, the word for my rest of my life has been "work" and nothing but work.  Progress reports are due along with a number of other evaluation reports and I've been spending a lot of time at the computer.  I've been making some progress on the Scottish Band Sampler from The Scarlet Letter, but I'll save that for another post.