Embroidery Thread Quotes

It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me, like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else.

If the reality of our life has become an unsettling arabesque puzzle and we still want to add more filigree embroidery to it, we might, some day, expect to stray from the point of recognition, lose the final thread, be expelled to the edge of delusion and forced to dance on the brim of chaos. ("Alert. High noon." )

She has always had a secret liking for this part of the embroidery, the ‘wrong’ side, congested with knots, striations of silk and twists of thread. How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece.

Thanks to His Majesty," the magus said, and my father seemed startled at the correction but not displeased. He looked thoroughly satisfied and very much like Ina when she has all her embroidery threads arranged to her satisfaction. He looked so pleased that I checked over my shoulder to see if there might be someone else behind me who had drawn his attention.

... life may be compared to a piece of embroidery, of which, during the first half of his time, a man gets a sight of the right side, and during the second half, of the wrong. The wrong side is not so pretty as the right, but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together

There are days when I think there really is some huge great tapestry of a plan out there and we're all woven into it - this fabulous, complex pattern of life and death, full of recurring motifs and waves of color, and we're each one tiny thread in the weave.

I began to know my story then. Like everybody's, it was going to be the story of living in the absence of the dead. What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough, just about all the way through. From the time I was a girl I have never been far from it. But grief is not a force that has not power to hold. You only bear it. Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

Sewing is a way to mark our existence on cloth: patterning our place in the world, voicing our identity, sharing something of ourselves with others and leaving the indelible evidence of our presence in stitches held fast by our touch.

The door of the jail being flung open, the young woman stood fully revealed before the crowd. It seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom that she might conceal a certain token which was wrought or fastened to her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush and yet a haughty smile, looked around at her townspeople and neighbors. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.

I’m riding a tram and, as is my habit, slowly absorbing every detail of the people around me. By ‘detail’ I mean things, voices, words. In the dress of the girl directly in front of me, for example, I see the material it’s made of, the work involved in making it – since it’s a dress and not just material – and I see in the delicate embroidery around the neck the silk thread with which it was embroidered and all the work that went into that. And immediately, as if in a primer on political economy, I see before me the factories and all the different jobs: the factory where the material was made; the factory that made the darker coloured thread that ornaments with curlicues the neck of the dress’ and I see the different workshops in the factories, the machines, the workmen, the seamstresses. My eyes’ inward gaze even penetrates into the offices, where I see the managers trying to keep calm and the figures set out in the account books, but that’s not all: beyond that I see into the domestic lives of all those who spend their working hours in these factories and offices...A whole world unfolds before my eyes all because the regularly irregular dark green edging to a pale green dress worn by the girl in front of me of whom I see only her brown neck. ‘A whole way of life lies before me. I sense the loves, the secrets, the souls of all those who worked just so that this woman in front of me on the tram should wear around her mortal neck the sinuous banality of a thread of dark green silk on a background of light green cloth. I grow dizzy. The seats on the tram, of fine, strong cane, carry me to distant regions, divide into industries, workmen, houses, lives, realities, everything. I leave the tram exhausted, like a sleepwalker, having lived a whole life.

In the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is often true that familiarity is fatigue. I am convinced that if we could tell the supernatural story of Christ word for word as of a Chinese hero, call him the Son of Heaven instead of the Son of God, and trace his rayed nimbus in the gold thread of Chinese embroideries or the gold lacquer of Chinese pottery, instead of in the gold leaf of our own old Catholic paintings, there would be a unanimous testimony to the spiritual purity of the story. We should hear nothing then of the injustice of substitution or the illogicality of atonement, of the superstitious exaggeration of the burden of sin or the impossible insolence of an invasion of the laws of nature. We should admire the chivalry of the Chinese conception of a god who fell from the sky to fight the dragons and save the wicked from being devoured by their own fault and folly. We should admire the subtlety of the Chinese view of life, which perceives that all human imperfection is in very truth a crying imperfection. We should admire the Chinese esoteric and superior wisdom, which said there are higher cosmic laws than the laws we know.

What is the thread that holds it all together? Grief, I thought for a while. And grief is there sure enough… But grief is not a force and has no power to hold… Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or mostly there in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery. Hannah Coulter by WENDELL BERRY

It’s why I like needlework,” she added. Fenris lifted an eyebrow. “Like splitting wood. Like you said. Embroidery doesn’t do anything. It isn’t anything but what it is, and I don’t have to worry that I’ve done something terribly wrong and my tutors will get sent away or that I slighted someone important and they’ll want to close down trade with my kingdom. I can just make pictures and patterns, and if I make a mistake, I can tear it out again and no one dies.” She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter that I’m a princess. The thread doesn’t care.

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)

Embroidery is beautiful not only for what you see, but for all you don’t. From the back, it’s a messy map—absolute chaos, all switchbacks and starts. Knots upon knots, pulled with teeth and pricked fingers. Each one a prayer, on a string.

The human heart is like a big mess of embroidery silks, and the more you pull, the more they tangle. The thing is, the threads have only got one end, if that. You can't sort them all out into colors. You just pick the ones you want and hold one to them as best you can.

No matter how far we have travelled –physically, emotionally, psychologically – from our heritage, it threads its way into our existence. We carry it in the way we engage with the world. We carry our ancestors wherever we go. I know this is a basic proposition. But it can be easily forgotten when we interact with each other. I’m not only made up of women, I am made up of men – my grandfathers and father – and my book doesn’t shy away from my inheritance from 'Kostaki'. The big question is: how can I change the patterns of my inherited history? I’m working on my contribution to change through my relationships, my philosophy and my writing.

gleaming like some fairy princess with sparkling jewels and gay embroideries. Her chignon was enclosed in a circlet of gold filigree and clustered pearls. It was fastened with a pin embellished with flying phoenixes, from whose beaks pearls were suspended on tiny chains. Her necklet was of red gold in the form of a coiling dragon. Her dress had a fitted bodice and was made of dark red silk damask with a pattern of flowers and butterflies in raised gold thread. Her jacket was lined with ermine. It was of a slate-blue stuff with woven insets in coloured silks. Her under-skirt was of a turquoise-coloured imported silk crêpe embroidered with flowers.

I open my eyes and for the first time stare openly at my own reflection. My heart rate picks up as I do, like I am breaking the rules and will be scolded for it. It will be difficult to break the habits of thinking Abnegation instilled in me, like tugging a single thread from a complex work of embroidery. But I will find new habits, new thoughts, new rules. I will become something else. …Looking at myself now isn’t like seeing myself for the first time; it’s like seeing someone else for the first time. Beatrice was a girl I saw in stolen moments at the mirror, who kept quiet at the dinner table. This is someone whose eyes claim mine and don’t release me; this is Tris.

Poppy was busy with needlework, stitching a pair of men’s slippers with bright wool threads, while Beatrix played solitaire on the floor near the hearth. Noticing the way her youngest sister was riffling through the cards, Amelia laughed. “Beatrix,” she said after Win had finished a chapter, “why in heaven’s name would you cheat at solitaire? You’re playing against yourself.” “Then there’s no one to object when I cheat.” “It’s not whether you win but how you win that’s important,” Amelia said. “I’ve heard that before, and I don’t agree at all. It’s much nicer to win.” Poppy shook her head over her embroidery. “Beatrix, you are positively shameless.” “And a winner,” Beatrix said with satisfaction, laying down the exact card she wanted.

That ornamentation of branches and leaves, forks, lobes, feathers, minute and without end, and the sky appearing only in irregular flashes and cutouts, maybe existed only because my brother passed there with the light step of a long-tailed tit, was an embroidery, made on nothing, that resembles this thread of ink, as I’ve let it run for pages and pages, full of erasures, of references, of nervous blots, of stains, of gaps, that at times crumbles into large pale grains, at times thickens into tiny marks resembling dotlike seeds, now twists on itself, now forks, now links knots of sentences with edges of leaves or clouds, and then stumbles, and then resumes twisting, and runs and runs and unrolls and wraps a last senseless cluster of words ideas dreams and is finished.

In embroidery, there’s just as much undoing as there is doing—plucking and pulling your thread back through the holes you pierced to see where you might have gone off-course, and where you might begin again. Our ancestors once believed the stars themselves were a result of this kind of occurrence, pinpricks of light poked in the fabric of night. The Creator doesn’t make mistakes, but sometimes it’s so damn hard to see the reason.

Embroidery is an improbable hobby for someone as disordered as me, but it's the very precision of it that attracts me, the illusion of control it offers. When engaged in stitching a new pattern, I can't think about anything else. Guilt, misery, longing all flee away, leaving just the beautiful little microcosm of the world in my hands, the flash of the needle, the rainbow colors of the thread, the calming exactitude of the discipline.

Slava’s mother tried to show her how to learn patience. Slava’s mother tried to teach her modesty, and good traditional values. She tried to teach Slava embroidery and dressmaking. Slava learned how to hold a needle, looping the thread through the eye without needing to use her tongue or her teeth. Slava’s mother tried to appear good. She tried to make it all look right. She tried to love her husband, death do them part. Scarf over her long hair, Slava’s mother made an offering in church and prayed. She made an offering to God. Later, she sold her daughter to the devil.

gleaming like some fairy princess with sparkling jewels and gay embroideries. Her chignon was enclosed in a circlet of gold filigree and clustered pearls. It was fastened with a pin embellished with flying phoenixes, from whose beaks pearls were suspended on tiny chains. Her necklet was of red gold in the form of a coiling dragon. Her dress had a fitted bodice and was made of dark red silk damask with a pattern of flowers and butterflies in raised gold thread. Her jacket was lined with ermine. It was of a slate-blue stuff with woven insets in coloured silks. Her under-skirt was of a turquoise-coloured imported silk crêpe embroidered with flowers. She

If you put a frog in some warm water and slowly turn up the heat,” Elaine said, wetting her embroidery floss between her lips so she could thread it through a needle, “he’l stay there until he boils. Kind of like people. We’re too lazy to change, so we’l just keep doing what we’re doing until it’s too late.

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.

I don't remember a lot about my mom. But I remember her doing these cross-stitches - they're little thread embroidery pieces. Anyway, one time I picked up one of her pieces and it looked awful–all messy, with all these knots and uneven strings hanging everywhere. I could barely make out what the picture was supposed to be. But then, my mom came over and took the piece of fabric out of my hands and turned it over–and right there was this masterpiece. I breathed out and smiled. She liked birds. I remember the picture–it was a nest full of babies, the mama bird just returning. I paused, thinking. Sometimes I think of those little pieces of fabric when life feels really messy and difficult to understand. I try to close my eyes and believe that even though I can't see the other side right then, and that the side I'm looking at is ugly and muddled, that there's a masterpiece that's being woven out of all the knots and loose strings. I try to believe that something beautiful can result from something ugly, and that there will come a time when I'll get to see what that is. You helped me see my own picture, Archer. Let me help you see yours.

A bell chimes as I open the door. It's even more magical inside than out. Spools of ribbon hang from the walls like the atelier of a fairy queen. Tiny jasmine buds lace through the curls of a crystal chandelier. Dresses fill the curves of antique wardrobes, as if this were a princess's closet and not a store. A group of girls squeal as they browse the gowns. They've dressed almost otherworldly, so unlike the yoga pants and sweatshirts I'm used to in San Francisco. Instead, they're ornamented in seafoam trousers made of silk, lace corsets with ruffles across the bustier, satin slips with rose embroidery. They wear seashells in their hair and around their necks--- an iridescent mollusk held together by a string of pearls, an abalone claw clip that flashes different colors beneath the light, pukas threaded between pastel sea glass.

Pray for the best, prepare for the worst

poured him more mead then moved to the ambassador, a noble-born Mevian by the name of Rukard. Though I felt his eyes on me, I refused to look at him as I refilled his cup. He was about Papa’s age, some gray at his temples, his long brown hair tied back in a tail. His fancy Mevian silk garb threaded with silver embroidery signified his importance. While I stood next to him, he flared his indigo wings as if he was trying to impress me. The moon fae were the only light fae who had beautiful, iridescent wings, ones that my true father would’ve had. The ambassador’s wings didn’t impress me, nor did his lecherous stare. His two guardsmen both wore the blue and silver armor of Mevia. They were bulkier than the ambassador, of course, and their wings were a deep shade of blue. I

Hmong women are renowned around the world for their embroidery, but not many people know how many backs have been bent permanently for the beauty and the bounty of a story told in cloth. In the camp, Hmong women sat on low wooden stools close to the ground. The ones with babies held their babies in the spread of their sarong skirts between their widespread knees. The women sat with curved necks and narrowed eyes. They settled in groups of three or four in the early morning, worked through the hot afternoon, until the light dissipated from the sky and the cries of the night crickets sounded. Each woman held a needle between her thumb and her forefinger and she picked at the white fabric strewn across her lap with her needle and her thread, telling the stories of her people, drawing the animals of her past, envisioning the way life could be again—if we could return the bullets to the guns, suck out the craters from the earth, stop the bombs from falling in the sky and the planes from flying overhead, and if we could stop time and tragedy from happening to the Hmong. The long pieces of thread, bright pink, neon green, and deep blue, rested in crumpled plastic bags by their sides. Without looking up, the women swatted at the black flies that came close to their children every few minutes. Occasionally, one stopped to heave a sigh in the midday heat, to stretch the tight muscles of her neck. When mothers got up at the day’s end, we heard the cracking of weary backs. When they reached out to the older children for steadiness, the young boys and girls stood still and grew as solid as they knew how so that their mothers could blink away the blur in their gazes, gain stability with their help.

People are like multi-coloured threads on your life's hoop. Your conversations with them, the designs. And then fate weaves it all for you, and interknits embroidery of all the incomplete colourful stories.

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.

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.

Do you remember,” I said, slowly, “when we were little and Hitomi the kitchen maid told us the story of the red thread? How some people are born tied together by a long scarlet string that no one can see? The red thread is fate. People joined in this way would always be searching for each other, always moving towards each other, even if they never realized it until the moment they met. Remember she said that the red thread may stretch, or tangle, but never, ever break?”   A pained half-smile twitched at one corner of his mouth. “You stole the red silk from your mother’s embroidery box and tied our little fingers together.”   “Which only lasted until bath time, when Father very firmly cut us apart again.” I stroked his left little finger with mine. “I still believe in that thread, Shinobu. I know it’s there. I can feel it, even if I can’t see it. We were always meant to be together. But maybe … maybe we weren’t meant to be together forever.”   “Mio-dono…”   “Shin-chan.” I forced myself to smile into his anguished eyes through the welling tears. “If none of this had ever happened, if Izanagi and the Nekomata had never come to the village, if we had grown old together in my family’s home the way we dreamed, we would have chosen this, wouldn’t we? To be together as long as we could. And, when it was time, to die together. After all these years, we finally get our wish.”   He whispered, “You have already made up your mind, my love.”   “Haven’t you? Where you go…”   He raised my hands and pressed them to his heart, then kissed each palm. “I will follow, always.

Needles—sharps, betweens, milliner’s, darners, tapestry, embroidery, beading, for all that must be pierced and adorned and joined together Pin cushion, apple-shaped, with a felt stem, to keep pins from getting lost Thimble, your mother’s, gold, on a chain, a tiny loop soldered to the top; wear it on your index finger so you won’t prick yourself, or around your neck, to remember Measuring tape, for determining shape and size, yards, inches, centimeters, the distance from here to there Thread—mercerized, nylon silk, textured, floss Fabric, swatches and yards and bolts, wool, silk, linen, net, whatever will come next, whatever will be made The pattern? Will it come from a drawer at the fabric store—McCall’s, Butterick, Simplicity, names from your childhood, the instructions in an envelope, the outcome preordained? Or will you make it up as you

Our lives are like a piece of embroidery: on one side, all loose ends, cut threads, and knots; but, turned around at death, a marvelous, coherent picture.

Even without his ostentatiously flourished new faith, there was much about Constantine that grated on aristocratic Roman sensibilities. In the glory days of Rome, real men had scorned luxury in their dress: merely wearing one’s sleeves a little too long, as the infamously dapper Caesar had done, had been enough to raise eyebrows and suspicions. Proper Romans—or so the rhetoric ran—should wear simple tunics that were becomingly manly. Constantine, by contrast, favored such a profusion of jewels, diadems and silk robes that even his usually adoring biographer Eusebius was forced to defend him. Left to his own devices, Eusebius wrote, Constantine naturally preferred to clothe himself instead in the “knowledge of God” and the embroidery of “temperance, righteousness, piety, and all other virtues.”6 Alas, Constantine realized that his people, like children, enjoyed a bit of show and so he was forced to wear crasser threads, which often involved gold embroidery and flowers. Such are the sacrifices one makes for the glory of the faith.

He is wearing a suit of pistachio silk, a silk lining of green and saffron stripes. The waistcoat, cut at the top of the thigh, is also pistachio, with modest gold-thread embroidery. The cuffs of the coat are small, the collar high. The cravat–saffron again–is almost as large as Armand’s.

with a basin and a towel of fine Holland cloth. Yet it is not known how often, or how thoroughly, people actually washed themselves. Elizabeth’s father, Edward IV, had his head, hands, and feet washed every Saturday, which suggests there was a difference between the ideal and the reality. The rich did take baths fairly often, using a wooden tub lined with cloth and covered with a canopy. The bather sat on a bed of sponges, which were also used to wash her with herbs, rosewater, and soap, and was attended by servants who spread mats for her to stand on and who stood ready with towels. Toothpicks and cloths were used to clean and buff teeth, and Elizabeth’s attendants would have tidied her hair with an ivory comb. All the Queen’s ladies were expected to be expert needlewomen, as much of their time was spent working with costly materials and threads of silk and gold, embroidering altar cloths, hangings, bedding, and garments, or sewing clothing such as fine shirts. These might be given as New Year’s gifts. Elizabeth Lock was the Queen’s silkwoman, and also made items for the King. At Christmas 1502, Elizabeth paid her for “certain bonnets, frontlets, and other stuff of her occupation for her own wearing.”45 Like many aristocratic women, Elizabeth enjoyed embroidery. She employed a

And who the fuck is Michael?” Huh? As realization hits me, I try my hardest not to laugh. Jealous Ryan is hot, so I’ll let this play out before admitting that Michael’s is the craft store where I buy my embroidery thread to cross-stitch.

turns the hoop over and inspects the underside. She has always had a secret liking for this part of the embroidery, the ‘wrong’ side, congested with knots, striations of silk and twists of thread. How much more interesting it is, with its frank display of the labour needed to attain the perfection of the finished piece. She runs her hands over its cartography: she can tell which stitches are hers and which Isabella’s. Her own are clumsier, hastier, with an air of impatience and displeasure.