NaNo Preview

My mind is so tired of trying to write at least 2,000 words each day, but I'm on the downhill stretch! Here's another peek of my writing...


"The Embroidery Lesson"


Phoebe licked the end of the thread and twisted the strands together with her fingers. She squinted at the end of the needle, trying to poke the stiff end through the tiny opening. “Why is it called an ‘eye’?” she asked.

“I suppose it’s because it opens like an eye,” said Miss Gwendolyn.

“Well, I wish it would open a little bit more.” She licked the thread again and finally got the green thread through. She pierced the cloth, pulled taut over an oval hoop made of bamboo. Pulling down, she watched the long stretch of thread disappear bit by bit, crossing a previous stitch. It curled into a knot and she had to stop to untangle it. She pulled and pulled until her arm was stretched out to her side, almost bumping her hand against the tall grandfather clock. “Oh no! I pulled the thread out of the needle again!”

Miss Gwendolyn smiled. “I did the same thing when I was learning. You need to pinch your fingers over the eye of the needle while you are pulling, so that it holds the thread in place.”

“I’ll never finish my sampler if I’m continually having to put the thread back in the needle!”

“You’ll get used to holding it, and soon you’ll be stitching right along.”

Phoebe worked on her sampler every Sunday afternoon. There were leaves and flowers around the edges, with cross-stitch on either side. It looked like a trellis of climbing roses…well, daisies… roses were too hard to make. The alphabet and numbers from 0 to 9 lined up across the bottom in two rows. At the top was a house with trees on either side and flowers on both sides of the front door, and beneath that was a portion of the poem “Let me live in a house beside the road and be a friend to man.”

Sometimes, Phoebe got the threads in a horrible knot and had to snip her stitches, making it necessary to re-do that part. The French knots on the flowers were hard. Sometimes the twisted knot just pulled through and just made a black dot, instead of a knob. She wished the knots would just behave themselves and go where they were supposed to!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You can reach 50, 000! Go Vonnie! Sunny

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