The most recent personal art challenge that I am undertaking is all about texture. This challenge covers four days and my image for Day One is the featured image of today’s blog post.

As many of you know, we lost everything we owned, including our house and possessions in Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  When we started replacing items that we had lost, we often replaced those items with smaller ones.

For example, I replaced my tall, wooden jewelry box with a much smaller box.  That jewelry box is covered on the outside with burlap and is decorated with a handcrafted design. Yarn, beads and shiny, colorful discs are embroidered into the burlap background. A card that came with the jewelry box explained that it was handmade in India and that the crafts person learned embroidery techniques that had been passed down from one generation to the next.

I can remember learning to embroider from my mother, who learned from her mother.  I learned how to position the material in what is called an embroidery hoop, a circular set of wooden rings that will keep the material pulled taut as you pull the needle and thread through it multiple times. 

The designs for pillowcases and handkerchiefs were printed onto the material.  We knew where to pull the thread through and which color of thread to use by following the printed design.

After my husband and I got married we raised two bulldogs.  My father gave me a piece of work that my grandfather embroidered during the time he suffered from a long, bedridden illness.  The design was a bulldog and he had used multiple thread colors as he finished the dog’s shape.  It was the only piece of my grandfather’s needlework that I had ever seen.  Unfortunately, Katrina also stole that.

How many of you that are reading this know how to embroider?

If you know how to embroider, knit or crochet, were you taught by your mother, grandmother or aunt?

What other craft might you have learned from older family members?

Please share your experiences with learning needlework or other crafts from your family members of an earlier generation in the comment section.

Click here to view a larger version of the featured image.