I recently joined the Fiber Artists of San Antonio (FASA) and volunteered to do a five minute “show and tell” at the April meeting. Only five minutes?! Anyway, I decided to (try to) do a sampling of how my work has changed over the years, beginning with how I learned to stitch as a kid and the last kit I ever did when I was in college …

The Chase Sampler, 1970s

Then moving on to my time as the Needleworker for Colonial Williamsburg in the early 1980s, when I taught students how to stitch silk on linen samplers …

 

while making canvaswork …

and marking linens  …

Followed by my library career days, when I only made time to stitch when on vacation …

as recounted in the post Sampling life: a family in stitches.

Culminating with my retirement, when I realized that cross stitch samplers were no longer what I wanted to do, after one last go at it …

But I’m most looking forward to recounting how I found Jude Hill’s Spirit Cloth and a lively blog community of stitchers: the Kindred Spirits who have sustained me ever since (many of their blogs can be found in the right side bar). Jude’s online workshop Spirit Cloth 101 led to the creation of my now preferred modus operandi, which I refer to as “patchplay” …

the development of which was documented during the creation of Prairie-tea-dyed cloth Land of Flood and Drought 2015 (best understood by going to the end of the 19 or so posts and reading them chronologically).

That in turn led me to Remember 2016, my favorite sampler to date, which shows the way I now learn by playing …

 

one day at a time …

And so it continues …

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