MACHIAS, Maine — The sun has set and the children — all four of them — are abed. The dogs — both of them — are settled for the night, and a cup of tea sits on the table, waiting to be sipped.
This is Barbara Chatterton-Luuring’s magical hour.
She settles herself in a big blue chair and raises her square of linen and her colorful threads.
She starts to stitch and begins to lose herself in her creations.
Chatterton-Luuring is an international cross-stitch artist. She creates her own designs, researches and writes articles for stitchery magazines, and works up patterns that magazines use as guides for other stitchers.
“I do get some funny looks from people when I tell them what I do,” she admits. “They look baffled when I tell them I’m a cross-stitch designer. I joke around that I make about enough to pay for my supplies.”
It’s not the lure of riches or fame as a designer that pushes Chatterton-Luuring into her comfy blue chair each night. It is passion.
“When I am stitching, there is a contented rightness with everything,” she says. “It’s busy here, with the kids and the dogs. Stitching is a great time to put things in perspective, to let go of the bad and embrace the good; to mull my life.”
Although she was raised in Machias, Chatterton-Luuring, her husband, Niek, and her four children — Mark, 12, Nick, 7, Rowen, 6, and Arden, 2 — just arrived five days before last Christmas from their home in Holland.
“We had two carry-ons, three suitcases and a guitar case,” she says. “The furniture didn’t arrive for five more weeks.”
Chatterton-Luuring lived in Holland as an exchange student, met her future husband and stayed 12½ years. “I didn’t really mean to stay that long,” she says, with an almost surprised look on her face.
She learned to speak Dutch, raised her children bilingually and made a life.
But it was never home, she says, and this was the time that stitching became her refuge.
“A lot of people don’t have support systems in place. Living in Holland with my husband was great, and he is wonderful, but without extended family, my mother, well …” she leaves the emotion unspoken. “Personally, stitching became a good way to work through those difficult emotional issues.”
It took three years of planning to return to the U.S., but the family has never been happier.
“I was thrilled to be back home,” she says.
“I work, feel and thrive best in an environment where things are simply what they are — the good, the bad or the ugly.
“I missed the diversity,” she adds. “Nature here is not prettified, not dressed-up. Maine is heartbreakingly beautiful.”
She has noticed a shift in the colors she uses since she has returned to coastal Maine. She collects bits of reindeer moss or a pine cone or the bloom of a spring flower that inspires her and finds herself matching the color for a hand-stitched piece.
As she works on one of her many projects, Chatterton-Luuring chatters away with a sewing needle almost absently tucked in the corner of her mouth. “My husband has learned to ask first before he kisses me,” she says with a laugh. “He learned the hard way.”
Chatterton-Luuring’s most recent project is a series of four historically accurate New England schoolgirl samplers.
She had been working with a stitchery magazine based in Australia, The Gift of Stitching, and one day had what she calls “an attack of courage.”
She pitched the sampler idea to the magazine and they bought it. A supplier, Vicky Clayton of Hand Dyed Fibers in Pennsylvania, began working with Chatterton-Luuring to create historical, paled colors.
She took surnames from actual Canaan, N.H., families, and added to the samplers the names of her great-grandmother Nora and the woman who taught her to stitch, Sarah.
“I wanted a community that was very rural but close to the sea,” she says. Historical significance was also important and Chatterton-Luuring says that Canaan was one of the many stops on the Underground Railroad. “That had meaning to me,” she says.
The samplers are done on 36-count linen and include some of her favorite stitches: eyelets, sawtooth borders, over one thread and over two threads.
Two samplers are completed, a third is in midstitch and a fourth is “still on the drawing board,” she says.
Chatterton-Luuring says she likes the limitation and structure of cross-stitch.
“This brings out all my passions,” she says. “I love the research. I love working with the colors, and I love creating these girls’ stories. These girls are three-dimensional to me.”
She admits getting lost in her imagination while stitching, pondering what the girls who might have done the samplers would have been like.
“The deeper it goes, the more that comes out of it,” she says of her art.
“It still kind of shocks me,” she says of her success with cross-stitch. “There are designers out there that I’ve put on a pedestal. To be in their ranks is such an odd feeling. I am doing what life has given me the opportunity to do and I’m enjoying it. I’m incredibly lucky to get to do this.”
Chatterton-Luuring’s work can be seen on her blog, http://mainelystictching.wordpress.com, or through her Etsy shop, Mainely Stitching, that can be found at www.etsy.com.