Many years ago in the late 80’s, my mother bought a needlepoint canvas with a floral design painted on it. She bought it at a lovely handwork shop, The West in Tucson, Arizona. The store was populated, I thought at the time, by fussy old ladies who advised and helped the customers with their needlepoint questions. The needlepoint was meant to cover a footstool that had been in my family since the 1940’s. It’s a stool I remember my brother, age 3, falling off and breaking his collar bone. I remember mother sitting on the back bay beach on Balboa Island working the green needlepoint that covered the stool for nearly 75 years. By the time I had the stool in my house, the cover was torn and tattered. But I always cherished the stool as a tangible treasured memory from my early days. When mother began to lose her strength and had to move out of her apartment into an assisted living facility in the early 1990’s, my sister and I did the work of cleaning out her apartment. I spotted the needlepoint tacked on a large wooden frame and put it aside. I couldn’t let it be given away. Mother had taught her daughters to do handwork. I appreciated the needlepoint even though it was only a quarter completed. It sat behind a door in my office for more than 25 years untouched until I picked it up during the current Covid pandemic. “I’ve got time now,” I thought. I wasn’t exactly sure how to do the needlepoint. The back of the piece shows I tried lots of different techniques. Fortunately none of them show on the front side. After 3 months of hard work, I finished the piece. Yesterday I got the stool with the new needlepoint cover on it back from the upholsterer. I’m thrilled. But what was mother thinking to put a white needlepoint on a footstool. Nevertheless, it is truly an heirloom, a piece from a by-gone time. I hope one of my children or grandchildren will appreciate the work of their great grandmother and grandmother in it and also cherish the footstool.
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