EMBROIDERED DISHTOWELS

Years ago, when I was still adjusting to being a wife and mother, my mother took a dishtowel from the drawer in my kitchen and gave it a second look. “Kathy!” she said sharply, “You need to straighten the hems of this towel and embroider it.” (Can’t you just hear her?)

Of course, that was not my priority nor did I consider that I had the time. I didn’t do it – I never did it – but for the ensuing 40 years, I have had no end of guilt over it. In fact, it became a buffalo sinking deeper into the mire of my “someday” list with each passing year. The problem is not the embroidery but straightening the hems. I assure you that I know how to do it. It just doesn’t seem – well, very important. It was important to Mother's generation, though, and I value that.

The standard of the retro housewife has weighed heavily on me. Such was my guilt that I simply kept few towels on hand. I’ve been hanging just one dishtowel – the one I finished while attending machine embroidery classes ten years ago. I wash it and hang it back up. It’s looking a little tired these days.

Occasionally Mike will question this practice. “Can’t we have more than one dishtowel?”

“I have the towels,” I tentatively respond, “but I have to straighten the hems and embroider them.”

“Oh,” he says, as if he understands. Maybe he does. His mother and mine came out of the same era.

Yes, it’s true that I have a stash of dishtowels – a real collection. I buy plain dishtowels whenever I see them, and each time I vow that according to the creed of the retro housewife, I will straighten the hems and embroider them before I use them. Some of the towels are quite lovely and probably don’t need straightening. As for the embroidery, I have three embroidery machines, and they make embroidering so much fun! I can do this, I tell myself, but the years still passed with no embroidered towels.

I am happy to report that I finally did it. I sat down at my Brother PE-770 and embroidered four dishtowels. Why did I put it off? It was such fun! Maybe I’ll do more. 

(No, I didn't straighten the hems. Not yet anyway.) KW

STAYCATION IS OVER

Filigree design on back of my shirt

Mike and Bess returned Friday evening (Oct. 12), and so my staycation with Nellie is officially over. However, Saturday morning Mike and Bess were out early for the opening of Idaho pheasant season. In a sense, staycation continues on a smaller scale, meaning that rewards are always appropriate.

Mike and Ken were disappointed in the southern Idaho / Oregon hunting trip. Mike says he always remembers the wonderful hunts in past years and forgets it just isn’t the same now. The bird population is down everywhere. Not only that, star thistle makes hunting difficult in our region.

Yesterday, I accomplished a machine embroidery project that had become a “buffalo.” Five years ago or so, I tried to embroider a lovely filigree spider web on the back of a t-shirt. I had a horrible lapse of judgement in the hooping and the project went awry. The loss of the t-shirt was no big deal. I immediately returned to the mart and bought another, and the original shirt was repurposed. However, the new shirt just hung in the closet waiting for me to get up my courage to embroider it. Let’s face it – I’m not going to wear a pumpkin orange shirt unless it’s clearly embellished for Halloween!

Web design on Mike's shirt

Machine embroidery is easy, but placement and hooping can be a challenge, and when I’m challenged, I need to concentrate, and this means I should probably be alone. This October staycation was the perfect time to face this buffalo. I watched a video tutorial, read a written tutorial, and then cleaned off the kitchen counter and set to work with the shirt, the stabilizer, and the mega hoop required by this design.

Long story short, I was successful. Yay! Now I can wear my orange Halloween shirt.

Mike was so impressed that he wanted a Halloween shirt, too, so today I stitched a design on an orange shirt for him. KW

MR. SKELETON

Purple ash in our backyard

Several years ago, I purchased a pack of machine embroidery designs from OESD titled “Halloween Couture.” The pack included a skeleton in freestanding lace to be stitched out piece by piece and assembled. While Mike traveled, I was inspired to make six of them – one for each of our children and one for us.

One of our sons recently told me that he wanted to hang Mr. Skeleton, but his sternum had come loose from his spine. (Somehow I’m not surprised.) In addition, he was rather limp – I suppose from several years in storage. Initially, he dissuaded me from stitching a new Mr. Skeleton, so I instructed him on how to re-starch and he tried to re-attach the sternum, though he admitted he isn’t good with needle and thread.

Well, I decided if he cared that much, I just had to make him a new skeleton. After all, I bought the design, and it’s good to use it. I can truly say I got my money’s worth out of this design. So, I stitched on Sunday and again on Monday – it takes a long time to stitch out all those pieces – and following the advice of Chris, my embroidery guru, I used the Bernina machine instead of the Brother for better control of machine speed. (At least, I think that’s the reason.) Lace designs need to be stitched rather slowly.

 

Mike left this morning to hunt birds in southern Idaho / Oregon and will visit the son in question, so I sent along the new improved Mr. Skeleton. Previously, I stitched the skeletons with white thread. This time I used glow-in-the-dark thread. Sh-h-h-h! Don’t tell him. I want to see how long it takes him to discover it. KW