I came of stitching age in the 1950s and 1960s when magazines that specialized in needlework and crafts abounded. Woman’s Day and Family Circle magazines, Better Homes and Gardens, and even Country Living magazine featured needlework and craft projects that caught my imagination and sparked my interest. These magazines gave me, and other yarn-struck women like me, hours of pleasure. From their pages I learned the basics of many forms of stitching and crafts, and formed the basis for my interest in needlework history.

Although I still have many of the needlework magazines I saved over the years, I knew I couldn’t keep every magazine that came home with me.

Whenever I found directions for handmade items that appealed to me, I tore out the article and dropped it into a manila folder. Over the years I accumulated patterns for sewing, knitting, crochet, quilting, applique, basket making, woodworking, teddy bears, dolls, hearts, cats, embroidery and macrame culled from those magazines. Then came the Internet with free patterns offered in every conceivable needlework and craft category. My overfed manila folders bulged in a most unattractive and not very useful way.

It’s beside the point that I will need at least two more lifetimes to put all those patterns and ideas into play.

The question was, what was I going to do with those bloated folders spewing patterns and directions all over the floor whenever I thumbed through them? The answer was obvious: Organize.

At a local office supply store, I bought page protectors and five ringbinder notebooks – one each for knitting, crocheting, applique, embroidery and counted cross stitch patterns and ideas. Last winter, I spent a few long, stormy evenings inserting the clippings into document protectors and putting them into the notebooks. It was a task that went well with cranky weather and subzero temperatures. As I worked I listened to jazz – Chet Baker, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Dave Brubeck, Billy Eckstein and Louis Armstrong were on my playlist. One night, I ditched jazz and reached for Bob Dylan, the Planotones and a bunch of Italian operatic tenors. I sang along as I sorted and categorized. I also thought a lot about the instinct to save and preserve, and concluded that pack rat genes are a strong facet of my DNA.

Now, instead of a stack of unwieldy file folders stashed in a small wooden chest, I have five ringbinder notebooks lined up on a shelf. The notebooks serve as inspiration, as a reference library and as sources of stitching ideas. They even function as a kind of “memory bank,” reminding me of that Christmas morning years ago when I got up early to finish knitting the mittens I wanted to give my son, or the sweater I knit from yarn spun from the fleece of a neighbor’s sheep.

The earliest patterns in my collection are from the 1930s, and the most precious are the ones my sister, my mother and several anonymous women scribbled on the backs of old envelopes or jotted on a piece of paper torn from a tablet. The newest ones are from the Internet, but I like these least of all. Older needlework instructions, I find, are much more clearly and accurately written.

My next task? I’m working up the courage to hoe out my junk room – where lurks an ugly welter of fabric, yarn, novels in progress and piles of color photographs.

Snippets

Interweave Press will publish a second annual issue of Interweave Crochet, which will be available Sept. 7.

Crochet is the current darling of the fashion world. Crochet has been shown in recent collections by Prada, Chanel and Tommy Hilfiger.

Www.craftyarncouncil.com has information about crocheting, knitting and becoming a certified knitting or crocheting instructor.

Ardeana Hamlin may be reached at 990-8153, or e-mail ahamlin@bangordailynews.net.