Embroidery Small Quotes

She noticed this time that his eyes weren't really gray, but green, and that perhaps they were set too close together. His forehead was awfully high, and when he smiled, his teeth were slightly crooked. And there was something cocky in his manner, but that might just be the salesman in him, she thought. Honora laid these flaws aside as one might overlook a small stain on a beautifully embroidered tablecloth one wanted to buy, only later to discover, when it was on the table and all the guests were seated around it, that the stain had become a beacon, while the beautiful embroidery lay hidden in everybody's laps.

Basket of Figs” Bring me your pain, love. Spread it out like fine rugs, silk sashes, warm eggs, cinnamon and cloves in burlap sacks. Show me the detail, the intricate embroidery on the collar, tiny shell buttons, the hem stitched the way you were taught, pricking just a thread, almost invisible. Unclasp it like jewels, the gold still hot from your body. Empty your basket of figs. Spill your wine. That hard nugget of pain, I would suck it, cradling it on my tongue like the slick seed of pomegranate. I would lift it tenderly, as a great animal might carry a small one in the private cave of the mouth. Ellen Bass, Mules of Love (BOA Editions Ltd.; 1st edition (April 1, 2002)

Small white clouds floated in the blue sky above, and on the street a flute vendor was playing the flute - a sharp, soft, sinuous, Oriental tune that twisted and turned in the ear like embroidery, like a picture of a dream in a novel, a trail of white mist coming out from under the bed curtain and unfurling all sorts of images, slowly uncoiling like a lazy snake, till finally the drowsiness is just too great, and even the dream falls asleep.

It was her only room, I now saw, trying not to look around too conspicuously—it served as her kitchen, bedroom, and sitting area. It was immaculately clean, the narrow bed in one corner made up with a white quilt and ornamented with several white pillows embroidered in bright colors. Next to the bed stood a table that held a book, a lamp with a glass chimney, and a pair of eyeglasses, and beside that a small chair. At the foot of the bed was a wooden chest, painted with flowers. The kitchen area, where we sat, consisted of a simple cookstove and a table and chairs. There was no electricity, nor was there a bathroom (I learned about the outhouse in the back garden only later in the visit). On one wall hung a calendar with a photograph of workers in a factory, and on another wall hung a piece of embroidery in red and white. There were flowers in a jar and white curtains at the windows. A tiny woodstove stood near the kitchen table, with sticks of wood piled next to it.

In 1931, amid that incredible transformation, a brilliant young Russian psychologist named Alexander Luria recognized a fleeting “natural experiment,” unique in the history of the world. He wondered if changing citizens’ work might also change their minds. When Luria arrived, the most remote villages had not yet been touched by the warp-speed restructuring of traditional society. Those villages gave him a control group. He learned the local language and brought fellow psychologists to engage villagers in relaxed social situations—teahouses or pastures—and discuss questions or tasks designed to discern their habits of mind. Some were very simple: present skeins of wool or silk in an array of hues and ask participants to describe them. The collective farmers and farm leaders, as well as the female students, easily picked out blue, red, and yellow, sometimes with variations, like dark blue or light yellow. The most remote villagers, who were still “premodern,” gave more diversified descriptions: cotton in bloom, decayed teeth, a lot of water, sky, pistachio. Then they were asked to sort the skeins into groups. The collective farmers, and young people with even a little formal education, did so easily, naturally forming color groups. Even when they did not know the name of a particular color, they had little trouble putting together darker and lighter shades of the same one. The remote villagers, on the other hand, refused, even those whose work was embroidery. “It can’t be done,” they said, or, “None of them are the same, you can’t put them together.” When prodded vigorously, and only if they were allowed to make many small groups, some relented and created sets that were apparently random. A few others appeared to sort the skeins according to color saturation, without regard to the color. Geometric shapes followed suit. The greater the dose of modernity, the more likely an individual grasped the abstract concept of “shapes” and made groups of triangles, rectangles, and circles, even if they had no formal education and did not know the shapes’ names. The remote villagers, meanwhile, saw nothing alike in a square drawn with solid lines and the same exact square drawn with dotted lines. To Alieva, a twenty-six-year-old remote villager, the solid-line square was obviously a map, and the dotted-line square was a watch. “How can a map and a watch be put together?” she asked, incredulous. Khamid, a twenty-four-year-old remote villager, insisted that filled and unfilled circles could not go together because one was a coin and the other a moon.

Oh, my," said Nerissa, when she could speak. Juliet, smiling, murmured, "Would you just look at her." "I don't think we can help but look at her," murmured an urbane voice, and gasping, all three women turned to see Lucien standing in the doorway, arms crossed and his black eyes gleaming in the candlelight. He lifted his hand.  "Turn around, my dear," he said, giving a negligent little wave.  Her eyes huge, Amy slowly did as he asked, staring down at herself in awe and disbelief.  The gown, an open-robed saque of watered silk, shimmered with every movement, a vibrant purplish-blue in this light, a vivid emerald-green in that.  Its robed bodice open to show a stomacher of bright yellow satin worked with turquoise and green embroidery, it had tight sleeves ending in treble flounces just behind the elbow, which, combined with the chemise's triple tiers of lace, made Amy feel as though she had wings.  She smoothed her palms over the flounced and scalloped petticoats of royal blue silk, and then, with impulsive delight, threw back her head on a little laugh, extended her arms and spun on her toe, making gauzy sleeves, shining hair, and yards upon yards of shimmering fabric float in the air around her. Hannah, who did not think such behavior was quite appropriate, especially in front of a duke, frowned, but Lucien was trying hard to contain his amusement.  He couldn't remember the last time he'd made anyone so happy, and it touched something deep inside him that he'd long thought dead.  He exchanged a look of furtive triumph with Nerissa. "Oh!  Is it really me?" Amy breathed, reverently touching her sleeve and then raising wide, suddenly misty eyes to her small audience. "It is really you," Juliet said, smiling. "Only someone with your coloring could wear such bold shades and make them work for instead of against you," said Nerissa, coming forward to tie a black ribbon around Amy's neck.  "Lud, if I tried to wear those colors, I daresay they would overwhelm me!" "Speaking of overwhelmed . . ."  Amy turned to face the man who still lounged negligently in the doorway, his fingers trying, quite unsuccessfully, to rub away the little smile that tugged at his mouth.  "Your Grace, I don't know how to thank you," she whispered, dabbing away one tear, then another.  "No one has ever done anything like this for me before and I . . . I feel like a princess." "My dear girl.  Don't you know?"  His smile deepened and she saw what was almost a cunning gleam come into his enigmatic black eyes.  "You are a princess.  Now dry those tears and if you must thank me, do so by enjoying yourself tonight." "I will, Your Grace." "Yes," he said, on a note of finality.  "You will." And

Where,” Eloise asked, one afternoon about a week after what Sophie was now referring to as the big kiss, “do you suppose Benedict is?” “Ow!” Four Bridgerton faces turned to Sophie. “Are you all right?” Lady Bridgerton asked, her teacup suspended halfway between her saucer and her mouth. Sophie grimaced. “I pricked my finger.” Lady Bridgerton’s lips curved into a small, secret smile. “Mother has told you,” fourteen-year-old Hyacinth said, “at least a thousand times—” “A thousand times?” Francesca asked with arched brows. “A hundred times,” Hyacinth amended, shooting an annoyed look at her older sister, “that you do not have to bring your mending to tea.” Sophie suppressed a smile of her own. “I should feel very lazy if I did not.” “Well, I’m not going to bring my embroidery,” Hyacinth announced, not that anyone had asked her to. “Feeling lazy?” Francesca queried. “Not in the least,” Hyacinth returned. Francesca turned to Sophie. “You’re making Hyacinth feel lazy.” “I do not!” Hyacinth protested. Lady Bridgerton sipped at her tea. “You have been working on the same piece of embroidery for quite some time, Hyacinth. Since February, if my memory serves.” “Her memory always serves,” Francesca said to Sophie. Hyacinth glared at Francesca, who smiled into her teacup.

Two kingfishers frolicking amidst branches of a small fig tree. Fleshy petals with streaks of pale yellow hiding a spread of fine black dots, embroidered in gradient with dark shades of saffron gradually giving way to yellow. Two birds alighting from the flower bush: one with its spindly beak , looking upwards- wings spread out, over sized head with a gay blue breast. The creature looked skywards, poised for a higher flight. The one below hovered over stalks of lilies. Its prussian blue head highlighted with lighter shades of blue and its orange body tapering in a stubby tail. One more fig blossom seemingly at a distance from the main frame looked more of a spectral double of its full bodied cousin, while a whole array of vegetation with stalky leaves seen two notches away as shadows embroidered in grey.

Tatterfell sews on cunning cuffs made from the scales of pinecones around the edges of frayed sleeves. Small tears in skirts are stitched over with embroidery in the shape of leaves and pomegranates and- on one- a cavorting fox. She has stitched dozens of leather slippers for me. I will be expected to dance so fiercely that I wear through a pair every night.

I was once uncertain whether it was right to love you, when the whole world seemed to quake in fear of you, and a thousand voices told me what was the right thing to do. But Mado was right: In all things that matter, faith in the heart is the only measure. But our mortal hearts are small; they are limited in what they can contain. What joy did it give me to hear that a thousand men lived to glory, when my heart grieved only for the loss of my brother? What does it matter if ten thousand men think the man I care for a tyrant, as long as I see him in a different light? Our lives are too brief to worry about the judgment of others, let alone that of history. You think my embroidery trivial, and yet all the works of men must be trivial in the fullness of time. There is no need for either of us to be afraid.

It was a thin thread that kept them tethered to the earth, a single strand of her embroidery floss, easily snapped. No one keeps us. They were all small lives, nowhere near the center. Tossed about by the gale of history and hardly noted for having endured.

Amy was mentally packing for a midnight flight to the mail coach to Dover (plan C), when Jane’s gentle voice cut through the listing of ovine pedigrees. "Such a pity about the tapestries," was all she said. Her voice was pitched low but somehow it carried over both the shouting men. Amy glanced sharply at Jane, and was rewarded by a swift kick to the ankle. Had that been a ‘say something now!’ kick, or a ‘be quiet and sit still’ kick? Amy kicked back in inquiry. Jane put her foot down hard over Amy’s. Amy decided that could be interpreted as either ‘be quiet and sit still’ or ‘please stop kicking me now!' Aunt Prudence had snapped out of her reverie with what was nearly an audible click. "Tapestries?" she inquired eagerly. "Why, yes, Mama," Jane replied demurely. "I had hoped that while Amy and I were in France we might be granted access to the tapestries at the Tuilleries." Jane’s quiet words sent the table into a state of electric expectancy. Forks hovered over plates in mid-air; wineglasses tilted halfway to open mouths; little Ned paused in the act of slipping a pea down the back of Agnes’s dress. Even Miss Gwen stopped glaring long enough to eye Jane with what looked more like speculation than rancour. "Not the Gobelins series of Daphne and Apollo!" cried Aunt Prudence. "But, of course, Aunt Prudence," Amy plunged in. Amy just barely restrained herself from turning and flinging her arms around her cousin. Aunt Prudence had spent long hours lamenting that she had never taken the time before the war to copy the pattern of the tapestries that hung in the Tuilleries Palace. "Jane and I had hoped to sketch them for you, hadn’t we, Jane?" "We had," Jane affirmed, her graceful neck dipping in assent. "Yet if Papa feels that France remains unsafe, we shall bow to his greater wisdom." At the other end of the table, Aunt Prudence was wavering. Literally. Torn between her trust in her husband and her burning desire for needlepoint patterns, she swayed a bit in her chair, the feather in her small silk turban quivering with her agitation. "It surely can’t be as unsafe as that, can it, Bertrand?" She leant across the table to peer at her husband through eyes gone nearsighted from long hours over her embroidery frame. "After all, if dear Edouard is willing to take responsibility for the girls…" "Edouard will take very good care of us, I’m sure, Aunt Prudence! If you’ll just read his letter, you’ll see – ouch!" Jane had kicked her again.

Next door was a vegetarian café and deli, and next to that was the Wooly Bear yarn shop. Its logo was a caterpillar in shades of yellow, green, and scarlet. Maggie went in. The shop was warm and bright, with one entire wall given over to cubbyholes filled with yarns of every hue in many weights and fibers. The opposite wall held small skeins and spools of thread on pegs for embroidery and quilting. There were racks of pattern books and magazines, and in the back a mini classroom was set up with a small maple table and folding chairs, now accommodating a group of eight-year-olds wielding fat knitting needles and balls of oversize wool. A girl of about sixteen wearing a Rye Manor sweatshirt was helping a little boy to cast on stitches.