springtime stitching

It was a whopping 49º here yesterday afternoon, but it was SUNNY. I had my office window open for some of that fresh air and saw more than one person in shorts. My family examined our front slope for young daffodil leaves poking up through the soil, and celebrated when they found some. Although this wasn't a difficult winter, it's clear that everybody's ready for spring.

A few days before Easter, Leah and I did some real life math to calculate how big her piece of evenweave fabric should be for her next project. We pulled a fabric thread to mark the cut line and that was all she needed from me for this project. She grabbed the bead boxes, the floss boxes, the bag of handpainted threads, and a good audiobook from the library basket, and headed for her room.

A few days later, she plopped the finished needlework on my desk, along with a frame from our attic stash, and asked me to help her with the framing process. We had a bit of a crisis when we washed and began to iron the work, only to discover, to our horror, that the handpainted thread was bleeding dye onto the crisp white fabric! After much agonizing over our very limited options, we finally decided the marks weren't too bad and to just let it be as part of the learning process. In the end, she had a very pretty piece of framed needlework that's perfectly suited for this time of year and none too shabby for a 9-year-old needlework enthusiast.

And as I was composing this blog entry, she popped into my office and grabbed the floss boxes out of their storage drawer again, then returned to her room, without a word. Hmmm...