Quest
Bright clean cream. Shiny sharp silver. A rainbow of cotton. A heron’s head. A black nib and counting skills. Hieroglyphics to decipher. These are all the tools I need to complete this journey. Even in the 21st century.
The aida cloth is my map. New and stiff to begin with, becoming soft and malleable with time. Oils from my fingers smudge the sharp corners and blur the lines. The stains will be hidden soon enough by the colours. There is a sensuous delight in handling this sheet of sharply etched squares. It is a blank map that would puzzle even Don Quixote. A map that needs to be filled in one clue at a time to reveal hidden treasure.
I have help. A sheaf of clue sheets made up of thousands of tiny hieroglyphic symbols. Charted on graph sheets, usually 100 stitches to a square and a page of roughly 70 squares…many pages. Thousands upon thousands of clues to transfer onto the empty map. Enough to sink the spirits and make the hand shake. Until the first colour is threaded and the quest is declared. A deep breath and I am on my way.
A journey into the unknown requires a well chosen weapon. It must fit the curve of my hand and have an eye fine enough and strong enough to anchor the colours, yet bend them to my will. The tiny swords used to come nestled in a black paper parcel. They were beautifully sharp, requiring the use of a thimble. Now they are artistically pinned on a plastic sheet and coated with an anti tarnishing agent. The tips are variously sharpened depending on their use. Mine are blunt tipped to easily slip through the holes in the aida cloth. These new ones, though, break far more easily than the ones I inherited from my mother. Mass production and a careless eye to detail have had their way with these little weapons too. As the Chinese say, may you live in interesting times.
It is not a lonely journey. I have a wild eyed heron for company. The heron is a migratory bird. This one, with a golden neck pointed to the sky and wings of silver, comes from a neighbouring country. It has a long life and a sharp beak. It hunts through a multi coloured swamp of thread, killing at will. It is short tempered. It even snaps at my fingers sometimes …
Cloth, pattern, needle, scissors.
And the riot of colour that brings them all together. Every primary and secondary colour you can imagine divided and further divided into a myriad shades. Some so similar that only sunlight and squinting helps distinguish the very light from light from medium, the dark from very dark from very very dark. The cotton is soft and smooth to the touch, each thread made up of six strands. Looped and banded into a skein of pure colour. Spilling across the cream, the rainbow river runs seemingly wild but a picture emerges all the same.
So the journey begins. It is not a straight road, nor is it easy to decipher some clues. There are days spent in retracing steps hastily taken, hours of hard work undone by a careless wrong turn. Frustrating, exhausting. Many deep breaths and sighs and swear words later, waiting at the end is fulfilment and joy and often praise. But it is the journey that is the meditation, the catharsis, the therapy. It is a prayer or a curse, a stabbing or a mending. Some days, it is all I have.