Column to offer crafty advice Writer untangles puzzle of hand arts

Editor’s Note: Starting today, Ardeana Hamlin’s column, By Hand, will appear each Tuesday in the Style section. When she isn’t copy-editing and writing for the Bangor Daily News’ sister publication, The Weekly, Hamlin spends her time happily snarled up with fabric, thread, knitting needles, crochet hooks and glue sticks. She is also the author of “Pink Chimneys,” a novel set in 19th century Bangor.

My approach to learning how to do needlework and handicrafts is to grab a book on the basics and to ask a few how-to questions from someone who knows more than I do about what I want to learn. Then I jump right in using whatever materials I happen to have on hand. I especially like making it up as I go along and unsnarling the knots when I find I’m long on enthusiasm, but woefully short on know-how and practical experience.

That pretty much sums up my approach to By Hand, which will focus on diverse handicrafts, ranging from needlework to potpourri. As the weekly column develops, I hope it will serve as a place where people interested in handicrafts can share stories, the sagas of needlework heirlooms, information about handicraft supplies, news of groups and their activities, efforts for charities, books about crafts etc.

If readers have questions about needlework or handicrafts, supplies and tools to swap or to donate, or tips on techniques, I will include them in the Snippets part of the column. I also would like to hear from those of you who practice the needlework traditions of other cultures. If there are any guys out there who knit or do other handicrafts, I’d like to hear from you, too.

My dive-right-in approach propelled me to cross-stitch my first sampler in 1985. That was the year I saw Susan Remick’s sampler, stitched in 1830 when she was 11, hanging in the stacks in Special Collections at the University of Maine’s Fogler Library – where it still hangs.

I was on a family history gathering expedition and had just discovered that Susan Remick was a leaf on my Herrick family tree. Right away, I decided to reproduce portions of it. I charted each motif – curly-tailed dogs, baskets of flowers, hearts, birds and trees – on graph paper and that became the pattern for my interpretation of what Susan Remick had wrought.

I matched the floss colors from memory since Special Collections drew the line at allowing me to take Remick’s sampler to the nearest needlework shop, even though a staff member had been kind enough to lay the framed sampler on a table to make it easier for me to study it.

Likewise, Christie Coombs’ interest in family and local history sparked her interest in samplers and their history.

Coombs, a librarian at Bangor Public Library, specializes in stitching reproductions of historic samplers, which come in kits or charts, purchased online from The Essamplaire and Scarlet Letter. She works on linen in silk floss, aided by a magnifying glass because some patterns may require 30 stitches to the inch. Some historic samplers, she said, are made entirely of cross stitch, but some use more than 30 different embroidery stitches. She suggests that beginners start with basic patterns with only one or two stitches.

“There’s nothing like seeing samplers real,” Coombs said. She has visited the Maine State Museum in Augusta, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Peabody Museum in Salem, Mass., to see the historic samplers in their collections. To see samplers online, she suggests the Maine Memory Network Web site.

Coombs has conducted classes in sampler making as part of the Hampden Adult Education program, but currently is not teaching a class.

Snippets

Annie Eldridge of Cherryfield is one of several dozen women who knit for Meals for Me’s Project Warm Hands. The mittens, hats and scarves the women make are distributed to children at preschools, day care centers, elementary schools and shelters. Project Warm Hands has been keeping little fingers cozy for five years. Yarn donations are welcome. For more information, call Gail Ward at 941-2872.

Well-made coats and jackets for men and women, especially those made of wool, often come with the pockets stitched closed, which makes them look like pretend pockets – or a whim of design rather than something with function. In addition, if the coat or jacket has vents or pleats, those are sometimes basted closed, too. They are basted closed to aid the pressing process and to keep wrinkling at a minimum during shipping. But no one tells the coat buyer that the basting stitches should be snipped away to release the pocket, vents and pleats to their proper functions. Now you know.

Ardeana Hamlin can be reached at Bangor Daily News at 990-8153 or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.