Are you left-handed?

When the owner of a needlepoint store in America contacted me recently to ask if she may pass on my Left-handed Instructions to her customers, of course I said yes because I believe the pleasure of stitching should be available to everybody. Those instructions, came originally from Anything Left-Handed in London. That company had stopped using them, gave them to me and after adding a few remarks of my own, I have been offering them to left-handed customers ever since. But this request from America made me look at the instructions again.
For linear tent stitch, after the first row is stitched, the work is turned upside down (through 180 degrees, not back to front) and the return row is stitched. Basketweave tent stitch fares a little better with no turning, but in both cases you must start at the bottom left corner of the stitch area. These methods mean that the stitches lie in the same direction as if a right-handed person had done the stitching.

Why such a fuss?

Needles, wool, canvas – none of these have a right and left in the same way that say, scissors do. So I cannot see why there is a problem. Surely, left handed stitchers could just stitch the other way round - Go in the opposite direction. If I would start in the top right hand corner, they could start at the top left. An exact mirror image. The only difference would be that the stitches would lie in the opposite direction on the finished work. Would that matter? Who says which way they should lie?

So as an experiment, I have reproduced my normal stitch diagrams, and simply flipped the images. Would this work? I don't know because I am right handed; what do you think?

(Anything Left-Handed is now an online store. www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk)

I'm not always in charge!

When designing, I often find at some stage that the design itself gets a life of its own and takes charge. There comes a time when the design dictates what happens next whether it is colour choices, size, imagery - more or less anything can happen! If all is going well I can surprise myself with the brilliance of what is unfolding, so when that happens I feel I can't really take credit for it. At other times, I can have a day when it all goes badly; the things I wanted to include just don't fit, the colours look awful etc.etc. I suppose then it is fair enough not to take responsibility for that either. The odd thing is that sometimes designing just seems to happen by itself and sometimes not - and I have no say in the matter!

When sportsmen say "I played well today" it is not as boastful as it sounds because one's performance is a completely separate entity and sometimes you just have to wait and see what happens. As a designer, I can be completely thrilled by one of my own designs and completely indifferent to another. Needless to say, the indifferent ones never see the light of day!