Primary thoughts

This is my needle book. It was inspired by the beautiful needle book that Mary Corbet posted on her site Needle'nthread.As I stitched this very first project freehand, I was drawn back to primary school - as a student, as a teacher and finally as a mother of two daughters. The primary colors, the playfulness and spontaneous decision I made while stitching. I didn't plan, I just played.Isn't that an important part of the act of creating something? Play? Do any of us take time to play every day? I'm lucky - I am a musician and music teacher - so I play every day for a living. When it feels like work, I know I'm doing something wrong and the children in my classroom tell me so by their lackluster response.

Do you see the little fern leaf things on the left side and the red and white pinwheel on the right? They were experiments that made me smile and still do every time I open it to get out my needles and scissors. They remind me - in the midst of the Christmas projects I worked on for gifts - that the reason I'm doing this again is to bring creativity and play into my life. To remember what it's like to create for the joy of it - just as primary aged children do.

Did the women who embroidered long ago see it as a chore, to be carried out exactly and to a high standard, or did they, too, let their imaginations play sometimes?