Sunday, November 18, 2018

Stitching One Handed

I want to thank everyone for their continued good wishes and  supportive emails. I am sorry I have not replied but just when I was feeling I was really on the mend last week and getting back to good energy, I fell when I twisted awkwardly and broke my left wrist. So after a night in emergency, the good news was that I would need to go back to hospital to have a steel plate inserted in the wrist as they were unable to set the break  cleanly. So last Sunday it was back to hospital to have the plate inserted, and now I am a one handed and one legged  operator. I must admit frustration at not being able to stitch or indeed do anything much on the computer except with one hand, so you will have to forgive the brevity of this post and also forgive my lack of replies to emails. My radiotherapy starts on 28 November and will go five days a week for 6 weeks.

I had been thinking how i could overcome this one handedness thing and still do some stitching, when I thought maybe i should try a  small freestanding quilting frame. The beauty of having textile friends is that someone was bound to have a frame, so that i could at least try. Sure enough Robina Summers had such a frame, and i have now installed myself on the couch to do some one handed stitching!



The beauty of this is that I have long been an admirer of what I call rough or wild stitching.  And especially so since seeing the work of Indian designer Swati Kalsi with Sujani embroidery. Normally my stitching is very neat, but being one handed means i have much less control as i have to leave a certain amount of slack in the fabric tension, to be able to push the needle under and up again. I am liking the roughness of the stitching and i can see myself doing more of this! I also like that it most definitely seems to have a mind of its own and is taking me whereever.