Learning to stitch, step one

Learning to make the stitch

The Pinthila class had 18 participants, four of us spoke English as our first language. This is language baptism by fire! We jumped right in, stretching some cheap, polyester satin in a frame, much like setting a quilt in a hand-stitching frame. Natividad, at left in this photo, is showing us how to stitch the fabric to a muslin strip, nailed to the two long sides of the frame.













Nati, as the local women called her, and I stitch the fabric on the second side. After two sides were attached at each of the three frames set up in the courtyard of the Oaxaca Textile Museum, we pulled them tight, and reset the huge nails we were using as pins on the cross pieces of the frame.














Nati then showed us how to hand-stitch strips of cotton to the ends. By ripping the strips lengthwise, we had two pieces to tie around the ends of the big frames. The fabric was as tight as we could get it. All this took about an hour, and the three tables were ready to begin stitching. I pulled up my stool between my friend Jo Ann, and Jeannie, a British artist who now lives in Bali but is travling in Mexico for a couple of years. I need a piece of paper and pencil for that story, too! Across the table sat Michaela, a local artist who owns a shop selling womens clothes that have been re-worked from their original designs. It's a cooperative, and sounds like a place I can't wait to visit. Maria, an embroiderer from Aztompa, a suburb of Oaxaca sat across from me; and Veronica, another local embroidery artist who just couldn't understand my bad prounouciation, and we never did have much conversation, but she did very nice work, and had a quick smile.
The only supply we were asked to bring to class was a size 14 crochet hook. The hook is so tiny, I can barely see it! We used polyester machine embroidery thread, held in the hand below the stretched fabric. In my right hand, I held the hook almost perfectly straight up. Natividad showed us how to punch the hook through the fabric, and with our left hand wrap the thread around the hook, and pull the hook back up through the fabric without catching part of the cloth. A loop is formed. Move the hook, repeat the action. Sounds so easy, and watching her make about two stitches per second, it seemed easy! Oh, what a lesson in patience we are all about to learn!

I spent most of the morning just 'pacing' back and forth, as you can see from the photo here. After a while, I felt a little more confident, and thought I needed to learn how to stitch in every direction, so I began the geometric design. This is the photo I took at the end of the SECOND day of class, after about 12 hours of work. This is not easy! There is not much conversation at our frame the first day, we're so focused on forming just one stitch. By the end of the first day, Jo Ann and I are questioning our capabilities.