Stitching is the new embroidery

Embroidery may sound so yesterday, but a slew of books proves otherwise: "Hip to Stitch" by Melinda A. Barta (Interweave, 2005), "Color on Color" and "White on White" both by Janet Haigh (Interweave, 2004), "The New Crewel" by Katherine Shaughnessy (Lark Books, 2005) and "Colorful Stitchery" by Kristin Nicholas (Storey, 2005).

The proto-feminist mag Bust recently featured an irreverent bit of cross-stitch by Julie Jackson, whose book "Subversive Cross Stitch" (Chronicle, 2006) has lots of patterns you wish you could put on a pillow and give to someone you don't like so much.

That's the thing about crafts -- they keep reinventing themselves. Just yesterday, it seems, knitting was the work of grandmas. Now, if you don't knit, you're not hip. Crochet is quickly following in those footsteps.

It's not the craft so much as the way it's applied. If you're crocheting antimacassars -- those chair doilies that keep a man's hair goop, or macassar, from staining the fabric -- that's old-fashioned. If you knit the same object in metallic fluffy stuff and call it a summer shrug, that's hip.

Embroidery is reinventing itself in part by calling itself "stitching." To "stitch" is cool; to "embroider" is, well, dubious on the hip-o-meter.

Nonetheless, the Cardinal Chapter of the Embroiderers' Guild of America has been hip for 25 years, ever since Darlene O'Steen put an ad in the Cary newspaper asking if any stitchers were interested in getting together. About 25 women responded. An ebbing and flowing group of women has met about nine times a year ever since.

Basically, embroidery can include "any type of work done with a needle," according to Gretchen Miller, president of the group. "This includes counted thread (like counted cross-stitch), needlepoint, embroidery in all forms, beading and anything else done with a needle."

At a recent meeting, Pamela Jenks, who joined the group in its first year, was thinning her stash after 25 years of feathering her nest with cross-stitch and blackwork ("you have to love geometry to do this") and tatting (a set of tatting spindles sat in the give-away pile) and pulled thread on linen ("you will go blind working on this") and French hand sewing ("I never got the hang of it -- it was like I had two catchers' mitts on each hand").

The group would ask an expert in a particular field to teach them a form of embroidery. In this way, they kept their creativity sharp.

Jenks was lightening her load ("I still have two drawers full at home") to focus on her first love: crewel. Crewel, named for the wool with which the stitches are made, is characterized by flowing lines, especially popular in late 17th century England. Jenks spoke wistfully of a long-ago trip to the Victoria & Albert in London, keeper of all things embroidered. It wowed her. It enchanted her. It inspired her.

O'Steen, the founder, became an expert herself, traveling the world teaching embroidery workshops. During those heady years of travel, she said, her son thought, "Mama was like a rock star and she was on tour."

Retired from teaching after a bout with breast cancer, O'Steen still loves to design -- her method is to just start stitching.

"I'm not willing to draw first," she said. Basically, she draws with her needle, in the process developing a tidy sequence of stitching that leaves minimal impact on the back of the embroidery -- no loose or gapping threads.

"It's almost like a puzzle," she says. "I love puzzles."

O'Steen's husband figured out how to chart her designs, and she began publishing them in magazines. She wrote a book: "The Proper Stitch" (Just Cross Stitch, 1994).

On display at the embroidery group's anniversary potluck are a couple of samplers designed by O'Steen. They are identical, but not.

"The individual comes through in her stitches," says Jenks.

The samplers are both a learning tool and a creative outlet -- a way to use the stitchery to grow.

And that, my friends, is hip.