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I thought that everyone's threads were in a fankle...until I met people who kept their flosses controlled.
I have never been that well organized.
Is this a reflection of my life?
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No Strings Attached
By Helen Kelley
This afternoon I have been taking my "fankle" apart, bit by bit. A fankle is what Scottish needleworkers call a snarly nest or mess. Until I met people who do large, lovely counted thread pictures and keep their flosses in controlled assortments, I thought that everyone's embroidery threads were in a fankle.
I am making pansies for the bottom of my latest quilt, and I want to embellish them with embroidered little purple lines in their centers. I found a lovely length of deep purple thread in my fankle, and bit by bit, inch by inch, I worked it out of the wad. As I untwisted the threads, I remembered doing the same thing as a little girl when we played with marionettes. I would guess that I spent nearly half the playtime untangling the strings of those puppets. I did not realize then what good training this would be for my later years.
Once I had extracted my purple floss, I was inspired to move on. My other threads are in a similar state. A collection of quilting threads is displayed on a board hanging on the wall of my workroom. Sewing threads are arranged in clear plastic boxes stacked nearly three feet high on the bookshelf. Odds-and-ends threads, including ancient spools of silks and metallics, are hidden away in a little wicker basket, and threaded sewing machine bobbins have their own special box beside my work. My whites and blacks are filed in the lid of a shoe box in my tool cupboard drawer. All of these hidey places have masses of thread ends spewing from them. Either the spools have unwound, or I never quite got the loose ends hooked into the notches on the rims of the spools in the first place.
To clean up these messes, I gave each thread collection a hair cut. I simply took my scissors and snipped off the mazes of loose threads. They look lovely now, all disciplined and neat, and I feel a heady success.
In this frenzy of neatness, I find myself looking for more scruffy fibers. Perhaps I could neaten up my fabric. My stash is quite hairy because it scraggles the ravelings of gangly threads that shredded along the edges of each piece when I prewashed it before I put it away. I know that I should serge or pink or nip the raw edges before I drop the material into the washer, but I have never been that well organized.
I believe there is something deeply philosophical about my loose ends. If you are like me, you may find yourself asking, "Is this a reflection of my life? Am I destined to spend my life in a cosmic fankle dealing with lint and shreds, forever neatening things, snipping, and vacuuming? As a quilter who is litter-prone, can I untangle my life?"
©HK 2002
Helen Kelley is a quiltmaker, lecturer, author, and teacher from Minneapolis, Minnesota. You can visit Helen on the Internet at her website www.helenkelley-patchworks.com or email Helen at this address: helen@helenkelley-patchworks.com.
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