Have Your Say

A Week for Chit-Chat

You may have noticed that we’ve been writing a lot of Have Your Say articles recently. After receiving so many fantastic responses to our newsletters, it’s been hard trying to keep up! But we wanted to assure you that if you’ve written to us, we will do our best to feature you. If you haven’t seen your message addressed yet, it is coming.

There are weeks we can group together your messages within several themes, and weeks when we have a delicious array of almost unrelated bits and pieces. These latter weeks can be a lot of fun and we find they often generate more conversation than any other.

This week is one of those weeks… it’s a general chit-chat where we share a bit about anything and everything!

Toody Cassidy wrote in a while back noticing we hadn’t sent out a greeting on the actual day of World Embroidery Day! Good pick up Toody, we hope the stories we featured in All Stitched Up! issue#298 helped make up for it, thank you for the good wishes and happy World Embroidery Day (belated) to you too!

Peggy’s Temari, all made from waste fabric

Long-time contributor Peggy Kimble thanked us for featuring her Temari in All Stitched Up! issue #292 and also mentioned that she enjoyed the reminder of her own visit to The Bayeux Tapestry many years ago. She also shared that the Quaker Tapestry, which we featured in that issue, is very close to her heart as she even put a few stitches into it herself!

2 of the 77 Quaker Tapestry Panels (source)

Leanne Atkins wrote to us from a very cold Tasmania, expressing her love of stitching samplers while keeping warm and cosy indoors. She too was inspired by the Quaker Tapestry and pointed to a communal artwork that was produced in Deloraine, Tasmania. Entitled ‘Artwork in Silk and Yarns’, a look at the pictures on the website indicates it is of an equally majestic scale as the Quaker Tapestry and filled with colour. It shows what wonderful things can be created when a group of committed stitchers collaborate and work together.

Artwork in Silk and Yarns – Autumn Panel (source)

We received another book recommendation from Susan Steele who just finished reading The Indigo Girl by Natasha Boyd. This is a story about how indigo dyeing started in the USA, brought there by a woman – no small feat at a time when women were often confined to domestic duties. It sounds like a good read and we thank you for the recommendation.

We also received a wonderful email from Elizabeth Braun from the UK. She wrote out in detail the explanations for the many acronyms that people use for unfinished projects. Here are a few:

WIP: Work in Progress – this is something that Elizabeth is working on, however slowly. She also had WISPs which stands for ‘Work in Slow Progress’. But whether fast or slow, these projects are always moving forwards.

UFO: Unfinished Object – Elizabeth was always led to believe that these were projects that had been put aside, never to be picked up again. Elizabeth doesn’t like these as they represent, for her, a waste of time – something she can never get back. She makes it her mission never to have any of these.

PHD: Project Half Done – this can be defined any way you like according to Elizabeth. But for her, it is a piece that is on the back burner for now, but she has every intention of coming back to it when she gets the chance.

Does anyone else have any favourite acronyms that they use in relation to their work? The three mentioned by Elizabeth are quite common, but we’d love to hear if anyone has any others. One of the acronyms that has always made us laugh is SABLE.

This stands for ‘Stash Accumulated Beyond Life Expectancy’. Sounds like it could be relevant for quite a few of us!

We’d love to hear from you with acronyms, things that make you laugh, recommendations or anything at all stitching related. We know we sound like a broken record sometimes, but your emails make this job worthwhile. We couldn’t do without them.