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!

GOLF AND STITCHING

I had my last golf lesson last evening. I should say, it was the last lesson in a set of five I signed up for at my local public golf course. The class got to play on an actual par-three, nine-hole course, though we only played two holes. Our instructor, Matt, is a chipper pro, very helpful and friendly and adamantly, almost obstinately optimistic. No matter how poorly a ball was hit, he’d find something to praise – the swing, the stance, the effort.

I have been going to the driving range and hitting bucket after bucket of balls to almost no good effect. If I had been making the same mistake over and over, I could have done something to correct it. But I topped some balls, struck the ground on others, sliced some and hooked other balls I hit. Once in a great while, I’d hit a good one, but I could no more see what I was doing right than what I was doing wrong.

Then this past Saturday I went over and there was an older man berating a much younger one – his son, perhaps – about his stance. "Bend your knees!" he shouted at him. "Arms straight, lock those elbows!" The hapless young man couldn’t hit the balls any better than I could, and at last the man turned away and began hitting beautiful drive after beautiful drive by himself. Grateful the tirade was over, I took my place on the line and bent my knees, and locked my elbows and by God hit a beauty. And then another, and another. They didn’t go far, only about sixty or seventy yards, but that was twenty yards farther than I’d ever hit a ball. And I could do it almost every time. It was wonderful. I will be forever grateful to that angry man.

And glad Matt didn’t use that method on us, it would have destroyed my pleasure in the game aborning.

My first drive off the tee on the actual course wasn’t too awful, it went straight out for about sixty yards. That was the only good stroke I made, but at least I wasn’t the worst player in the class. My other strokes were merely bad, not disgraceful. One unfortunate classmate seemed to have forgotten everything she’d learned, I think because we each had to take a stroke while everyone else stood and watched.

Now I want to play some more. I want to play all nine holes of the par three. All the way home I thought about the bad strokes and what I did wrong and how I would correct that my next time out. My current set of clubs was purchased for five dollars at a garage sale and included the bag and cart. My woods are made of real wood – they are beautiful, but I need a good driver, one of those titanium things. I don’t know if I’m ready for a better set of clubs; I think I’ll play this summer with these old ones. But if in the autumn I’m still playing, I think I’ll see about getting a nice second-hand set.

Here’s another hint for beginning stitchers. How may times have you been told not to tie a knot at the end of your floss, but to run it under some other stitches to fasten it down? That’s all very well when there are some other stitches to run it under, but what to do when you’re starting out? I tie a knot, BUT then I go down through on the right side of my fabric about eight stitches down from the starting place. Come up from the wrong side at the starting place, and begin stitching. Five or six rows down, snip the floss on the wrong side near the knot and discard the knotted end. Your floss is fastened down by the other stitches. Isn’t that cute?

Yesterday was my thirtieth wedding anniversary. A few more and I’ll have been married half my life. Question: Would I do it again? Answer: Yes.

I’ve been working on three things, not counting my golf swing: The galley proofs of Blackwork, Chapter Six of Buttons and Bones, and the short synopsis of what might be the pilot of the Betsy Devonshire mystery television series. I think of the three the last is the one with two chances: fat and slim, so I’m working hard on not getting too worked up over it. The other two are dead serious. I really like Blackwork, and think it might be one of the best, if not the best, of the series so far, so I want it to be really clean and sharp. And it’s important to get things right in the early stages of a novel, so I’m trying to focus in on Buttons and Bones. So why, when I go to bed at night, do I find myself wondering the next steps would be if I actually got an offer for the television rights?