I was very excited recently to receive my mail-order
embroidery punch needle set, along with a gigantic bag full of brilliantly-colored
embroidery floss. I’d been hanging out a lot on my Punch Needle Facebook page,
and I became enamored of the amazingly detailed and beautiful work that I saw
there. I had visions of gorgeous, ornate florals, lush landscapes, and
scintillating portraits dancing in my head, but I only had one large yarn punch
needle and was not able to do the elegant, detail-rich designs that I so pined
for. As it turns out, merely having a nice set of embroidery punch needles does
not guarantee that one can instantly create visionary art. It’s trickier than
that.
First off, the process of learning to separate the
embroidery thread strands without getting tangles and knots has been maddening.
I read a great deal of elaborate advice about thread separation on my Facebook
page, much of it involving fishing reels and weights, but it was all too confusing,
and in end I decided the best thing to do was just struggle through it by hand.
However, this makes it extremely slow-going, because there is a limit to the length
of strand I can separate. I find myself spending more time separating the floss
and threading the needles than actually punching the cloth. Also, with more
detailed designs comes an increased need for attention to technique, which as
it turns out, I am lacking in. I’ve gotten away with it in the past because I
haven’t been doing anything elaborate, but now I actually have to pay attention.
The upshot of all of this is that I’ve decided to put the fancy needles away for
a while and punch me a cow design using the big, clunky, forgiving yarn needle.
Why a cow? I do not know, but a cute cow seem fun and relaxing, and I’m tired
of pulling my hair out trying to get all artsy.
Speaking of artsy, I’ve been spending a good
deal of time this weekend working on some edits for some poems that are going
to be in an upcoming anthology. For some reason, I’m finding it extremely
difficult to make decisions. I haven’t written much poetry since finishing the
novel, and the poem section of my brain seems to have atrophied. I don’t believe
in overthinking poetry too much either when writing it or reading it, but even
simple decisions about commas are feeling loaded and daunting to me. But on the
plus side, it has inspired me to sit down with my gigantic Wallace
Stevens anthology and start reading poetry again, with the aim to find my
way back into writing it again eventually.
That’s all for this week. I’m off to go punch a
cow and hopefully untangle my muddled brain in the process. Enjoy this
beautiful ancient Swedish cow-herding song:
--Kristen McHenry
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