Needle popping

Tonight we were reading back through the notebooks we wrote in when our kids were very little; the silly things they said and did, and their latest achievements. We were actually trying to find out when they crawled and walked, for a medical questionnaire. Do you think we recorded that anywhere? Nope!

One of the stories written in one of the books was this:
“Yvette was embroidering at dinner time. [No surprises there!] Youngest child said “Mummy is making an extraordinary noise!” as the needle went into the fabric.”

And that reminds me of when our eldest was quite young and my husband had been in trying to settle her off to sleep. I was working on the first project for our Mountmellick book, which was the large blackberry runner. Previously I had worked mostly with linen, which is not such closely woven fabric as cotton satin jean, and the needle tends to go through the fabric more easily.

So there I was, stitching away, with my fabric stretched nice and taut in my hoop. After settling our eldest, my husband came out and said, “What IS that popping noise?!”

It was the needle going into the fabric!