“Addison, I need you at my place PRONTO,” Kelsie blared over the phone on a dull Tuesday evening in the beginning of May. “There is no time to lose, TIME IS MONEY.”
From the sound of it, you would think we were running a covert operation. “Uhhh, OK, I’ll be there in a second,” I blurted back, dizzy from the slam of vague intensity that radiated from my best friend.
Kelsie is infamous for her distinctively, almost irritatingly excited demeanor. As long as I can remember she has supplied me with hilariously animated reactions to the tiniest things. Upon checking my phone during a nice date last spring, I was startled to see over 10 missed calls from Kelsie over the course of the few hours I had it on silent. I could tell something was off. I politely slipped outside to call her and check up on things. The phone rang probably 10 times before she finally picked up. “GUESS WHAT I JUST SAW?” she brayed. “What..?” “COLTY JUST CAUGHT AND KILLED A QUAIL.” Colty, Kelsie’s adorable black lab, is known for his comedically scrawny body and pathetic disposition. The fact that this silly, sad dog pulled off a stunt as macho as this was in itself significant, but by no means was it breaking news.
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been as surprised or confused when she called me with such urgency, but that night was steeped in the kind of tedium and lethargy only summer break can possess. I stumbled to my car and sped to Kelsie’s house. “I’m in the craft room,” she texted when I let her know I had arrived. Maybe it was the set of stairs I had to ascend to reach her or maybe it was the anxiety stemming from the curiosity behind the ordeal, but by the time I finally made it to her my heart rate was through the roof.
I cautiously pushed the door open, unsure of what to expect, until something I never would have expected came into focus: Kelsie, pleasantly perched on the office chair, with her head bowed and her hands rested on her lap working away on something I couldn’t quite make out. “Look at this, dude!” She thrust a washcloth into my line of vision.
I wasn’t sure what to say. I mean, it was a washcloth. A black-and-white striped thing, probably purchased from Target, nothing spectacular. All of that anticipation for this? I always knew Kelsie could get a little over-excited, but this suggested something far more serious. Maybe something wasn’t quite right with her. “Uhh, Kels … ?”
She waved the cloth in my face again and again, each motion with an umph that asked “ARE. YOU. DUMB?” I gazed deeper onto the square of fabric until it finally clicked. A hand-stitched capital “B” emblazoned the washcloth in an alluring black thread. “It’s for mother’s day,” she explained, “and it has been, like, super fun to make!”
She spent the next hour explaining the ins and outs of hand-embroidery. Until that evening I had never heard of a tambour frame (the two hoops that hold the fabric taut and in place), and the idea of a sorbello stitch was as foreign to me as babah ghanoush. Guiding me through multiple techniques, Kelsie molded me into an amateur expert in less than three hours. By the end of the night I was hankering to get my hands on a shirt, any shirt, and test out my miraculous new powers as a hand-embroiderer.
The stars were aligned for me that night. A shirt was already waiting upon my arrival home. Originally intended for another D.I.Y. project with mess of iron-on embroidery patches (the project fell through due to a disappointing famine of interesting patches available around town and on Etsy), my solid light-blue, collarless button-down was the perfect canvas for my work of inevitably remarkable art.
After a couple days of deliberation, I decided on a pattern for my embroidered masterpiece: a wide pinstripe with alternating colors. I measured the width of the shirt, divided it into three parts, and lightly lined the shirt every inch and a half with pencil. This will be easy I kept telling myself. This emblem of sheer human talent will be done in no time. With nothing more than a knot and a stitch I embarked on my indelible journey toward the perfect shirt.
Kelsie taught me every fascinating morsel of information I knew about embroidery, but she left out one vital fact: Embroidery takes basically centuries to finish. Working day and night and during any breath of free time, the project took me three solid weeks to complete. Mind you, that is including the countless hours I spent in meetings, at dinner, and in bed monotonously pinning colored floss in and out of that damn shirt.
It proved to be surprisingly therapeutic in the end. The plodding beat of the stitch soothed in a way that briefly relieved the various bouts of anxiety that thwarted me at the moment, things that would no doubt put you to sleep if included here. I may have been convinced she was deranged in those few moments when my best friend neurotically waved a dishrag in my face, but Kelsie was really onto something with the whole embroidery thing.
There is a magically meditative state that can only come to be in the repetition of a simple task over and over, carefully constructing a dazzling product. If you find pleasure in creating I advise you pick up a needle and thread and get embroidering. If nothing else, you’ll end up with a pretty cool shirt in the end. And that’s all anyone can ask for, really.
@TheChrony