I started "stitching" around 8 years of age. It all started with a set of lace-by-number cards my mother had kept from the 1960s. She saw that I enjoyed the process of lacing through the cards in order. I then had two or three needlepoint kids from Fisher-Price (yes, Fisher-Price!). And, I stitched a "large" sailboat on 10 mesh plastic canvas. I also dabbled a little in the other 1970s/80s crafting craze: hooked rugs.
Around this same time, my grandmother was living in a nursing home close to my parents' house. Her 90+-year-old roommate Minnie Spicer was an avid crocheter with an equally ravenous desire to teach the world to crochet. For the next 15 years or so, I was mostly doing crochet with some cross stitch here and there.
Growing up in the early 1980s, needlepoint kits were prevalent, even for kids. The 1970s had seen the explosion of needlepoint. It was nearly always stitched in Persian wool, with Paternayan three-ply wool the market leader. Men, women, and children were all churning out pillows, rugs, hangings, chair and piano bench covers, eyeglass cases, belts, tissue box covers, tennis racket covers (yes, tennis racket covers), and the list goes on and on. The NFL football player Rosey Grier became a male needlepoint icon with his seminal book Rosey Grier's Needlepoint for Men (1973).
While in college, I visited a high school friend at her parents' ho use. Her mother was a devoted needlepointer and cross stitcher. She had a copy of Frank Cooper's book Oriental Carpets in Miniature: Charted Designs for Needlepoint or What You Will (1994). Long out of print but with many copies still available in the secondary market, Frank's book was a careful study of numerous oriental carpet designs from museums around the world. I was fascinated by the precise of Frank's research, which resulted in detailed charts coded for Paternayan colors. That was it! I wanted to stitch my own oriental rug using one of Frank's charts.
My original idea was to stitch one of Frank's kazak designs on a large mesh canvas to create a large wall hanging. I had no idea how much wool that would take. And, I went to a shop that didn't carry Paternayan. Conversions were made to Wool Masters and I was off! With a large mesh interlock canvas, I was actually cross stitching in order to get good coverage and the entire project was "eating" wool faster than my graduate student budget would allow. I never finished it.
In the winter of 1997–1998, I was going to Europe with my dissertation advisor and another economics professor as the graduate assistant for their undergraduate study abroad program. I needed something smaller to stitch and so I started again on a Frank Cooper design, this time stitching on 18-mesh interlock canvas. I completed that miniature rug, had it elegantly framed, and today it hangs in my good friends Stuart and Dorothy's house in Newark, DE. More importantly, I was hooked. Over the years, I have stitched four of Frank Cooper's designs.
To be continued...
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