Favorite Tool

I was a little bit nervous when I saw the assignment to write about my favorite tool as this week’s theme. What would a stitcher’s favorite tool be, if not a needle or floss? Then I read the first two blog entries and laughed out loud.

So all right, my favorite tool is a size 24 tapestry needle. Unless it’s a size 26. But on reflection, my second favorite isn’t floss, or not exactly. It’s a wooden cabinet with three shallow drawers that holds cardboard "bobbins" of DMC floss sorted by number. I don’t update it daily or even weekly. I dump new skeins of floss into the section covered by a slanted cover, then now and again get a "let’s get organized" jones going and will sit down and wind bobbins for most of a morning or afternoon. Before I started using this cabinet, my floss was just in a box and I didn’t know what I had or didn’t have and so would buy new floss for every new project. Now floss isn’t expensive, but after awhile even I noticed I had six skeins of partly used up DMC 434. Now at least I can check to see if I need to buy a certain color or if I already have it.

Work on the crewel piece of sheep in a meadow is moving along. When I get frustrated or overwhelmed by working on what I hope will interest a producer into making an offer for the rights to the Betsy Devonshire mysteries or on Buttons and Bones, I can sit down with the sheep. I’m usng some exotic floss – it’s a mix of oranges with lots of slubs – to make an autumn colored tree and so far I think it’s working. I’ll know when I get a little more of it finished. Then all I’ll have left are the touchups – there are always little places left uncovered with stitches, and maybe even a place that needs to be "frogged" (rip it, rip it) and done in another color or stitch.

For the producer, I am supposed to come up with a bio sheet on Betsy and then six synopses of episodes for him to read. I’ve got five and a bare start on the last one. Deadline: August 1. I think I’m going to make it. Then I’ll have to work like a son of a gun on Buttons.

I have been working on Buttons and Bones, just not as hard as with the other project. The research I did up in Cass County is proving very valuable.

I thought my eyes were improving but they aren’t. Last time I saw my eye doctor, he said there were glasses that would correct the double vision, but he wanted me to wait another month. That was only a week ago. What I don’t understand is why squinching up my eyes helps.

No golf in a week; every time I’ve had the time, it’s rained. Like yesterday, for example.

I got my information packet from Bouchercon (the biggest of the mysery conventions, held in October) on Tuesday. They are asking everyone who is coming to read the same book: Rex Stout’s Some Buried Caesar, and actually include a copy of it with the packet. I haven’t read Rex Stout in many years, though I was a big fan back in the day. I had never read this entry, so I’m really looking forward to this. They promise some of the programming will revolve around the book. Clever of them!