by Ardeana Hamlin
of The Weekly Staff
At one point during the long cold winter of 2013 when I thought spring would never come again, I descended into several weeks of binge-crafting. This took the form of embroidery. My idea was to stitch motifs in a Maine theme on flour sacking dish towels. The motifs I chose were birds, sailboats, seashells, pine trees and whatever else I dreamed up, including the word MAINE — motifs that channeled summer.
Binge-crafting, for those who have never fallen prey to it, is when you find yourself making many, many of the same items instead of making only one or two. It’s great if you need to produce multiples of items to sell online or at a craft fair. Not so great if you get stuck on the merry-go-round of making, then making more, and more.
I used a light box to trace the designs directly to the dish towels, which I bought in packages of six at a local store. I found some of the designs free online at french-knots.com, but also dreamed up a few of my own designs.
In the process of tracing the designs to the dish towels, I opted to use paint stencils instead of the light box. That worked fairly well until I tried a small brass stencil — a sailboat design, which turned out to be much too small. I relegated that dish towel to the bottom of the stack. I would decide what to do about it, if anything, at a later date.
I stitched my way through episodes of “Call the Midwife,” “Lark Rise to Candleford” and “Antiques Roadshow” while snow and temperatures fell. Not one of the motifs had anything to do with winter, and that was not coincidental.
By the time April arrived, the only dish towel that hadn’t been stitched was the one with the tiny sailboat motif. That, I thought, needs to be covered up with applique.
And there it sat until the middle of May when the ladies of my Stitch group gathered at my house on a Sunday afternoon.
Minutes before my stitching companions arrived, I pulled a scrap of batik and a scrap of coordinating fabric from a tote, cut, freehand, six petal shapes from the batik and a lopsided circle from the other fabric. These I pinned over the sailboat motif. It wasn’t a perfect fix, but it worked for me.
Applique requires that the raw edges be turned under and stitched down with blind stitches, easy enough to do, though patience is required.
After all the pieces had been sewn in place, I stitched around each one with gold-color embroidery floss using a blanket stitch.
The design I wanted to hide still showed a few straggly lines, but at that point, I really didn’t care. It was spring. My flowerbeds needed work, the lawn needed mowing again and I thought how nice it would be to segue to binge-gardening instead of binge-crafting.
Then it began to rain and rain some more. I baked cookies, I made chicken soup, I hoed out closets that hadn’t seen the light of day in a very long time.
My biggest fear during those weeks was that If the rain didn’t stop, I’d be lured — heaven help me — into binge-beading.