Extremes

One of the things we love at Inspirations HQ is receiving correspondence from our tribe as it helps us feel connected to the readers who are often on the other end of this very newsletter.

On Monday mornings, we regularly find our email inboxes overflowing with the correspondence that was generated from the previous week’s newsletter. Sometimes the emails contain simple questions about a product, order or project. At other times they are responses to a conversation that was started in All Stitched Up! Whilst sometimes we find within the emails details of someone’s journey with needle and thread that captures our attention immediately.

And so it was recently.

Although not in direct response to our newsletter, we read with sadness Mary Corbet’s update on her mother. Only just recently released from hospital, Mary now finds herself spending many an hour at her mother’s bedside as she has once again been admitted to care.

From Mary’s email, we then came across an Instagram post from one of Inspirations’ contributors who had just celebrated a milestone birthday.

From one extreme to the other!

From a season of sadness in Mary’s case through to the jubilation of celebrating a life well lived, a common denominator existed in each story – needle and thread.

To while away the hours spent in the hospital with her mother, Mary Corbet is accompanied by her ‘hexies’ who are helping her navigate a stressful situation. Requiring some 5,200-ish hexies to complete her quilt, Mary realised that where there’s stress there should also be handwork and so packed her needle and thread accordingly.

In the form of edible crewel icing, ‘needle and thread’ were used to decorate a milestone birthday cake that aptly celebrated the life of one very passionate stitcher who couldn’t contain her happiness as she posed behind the stitching that had inspired the truly unique cake.

Whilst each story sits on the opposite end of life’s emotional spectrum, we love that needle and thread are equally at home in each. It truly is a passion that accompanies us through both the ups and downs that life throws at us, and for that we can all be incredibly grateful.