embroidery floss

One of the things that makes me happiest, for some reason, is embroidery floss.

I think it's the possibility it represents - all those little bundles of pure color, waiting in their little bins, for someone to find a use for that particular shade.

I love color and I love working with color. But I can't paint very well (and paint is messy, even watercolors - and I don't currently have a good "messy work" setup in my house). So I use floss and fabric as my stand-ins for paint.

I also like the physical nature of floss. Unlike paint, which has to stay in its tube until you use it, you can set the skeins of floss in a bowl and look at them - or even just keep them in a box and take one out and look at it now and again.

I find I need that kind of color sometimes. Sort of like the pioneer woman I remember from a story who wept when her husband brought her home a forced narcissus in the middle of winter because all she had had to see for weeks and weeks was grey, brown, and tan, and the green was almost too much for her.

There is a purity to the colors of the floss. Some of them are very strong and saturated; I find those are the ones I tend to be drawn to. Also, I don't generally go for the primary colors - I like jeweltones or strong "secondary" colors.

I also think I like it because it's crazy cheap. I'm kind of a cheapskate in some ways and one is that I don't like to spend huge amounts of money on myself. But with floss - when I need a little treat, I can go and get a couple of skeins inexpensively, usually 4 for a dollar these days. And a single skein goes a long way when you mostly make small projects.

I also like that it's widely available. I can even get it at my local wal-mart. And I can get my standard brand at the wal-mart (which is unusual; so many of those big box stores carry only the crap brands of craft supplies, because that's what they can get cheap and in big volume, and that's about what their typical customers either can afford or are willing to pay for. Yeah, I'm a snob about some things. Sue me because I don't like acrylic yarn.) But they carry DMC floss, which is the standard brand I buy.

I know there are fancier, "nicer" brands to be had at needlecraft shops, but I've found that good old DMC works fine for me. And, as I said, you can even get it at wal-mart if you need. And the colors seem to be pretty true: 825 is going to be 825 all the time, with little variation from batch to batch.

I like having a lot of floss on hand. I do some embroidery, mostly simple stuff, outline-stitched cartoony designs, kitschy things. I make tea towels with chihuahuas or the Eiffel Tower on them for example. (And yes, I use my embroidered towels to dry my dishes. If they wear out I can always make more). I like having a wide variety of colors so that when I'm seized with the desire to start a new project, I can just plunk down and DO it, without having to run out for all these colors of floss.

Sometimes I buy with a project in mind. More often, I just buy what grabs my attention - I was out today and at one of the larger craft-type emporia in my area, so I bought a couple bucks' worth of floss - as is typical of me, I chose "complicated" colors - greyed purples and oranges that shade over into red and greens that are almost yellow. I just grabbed what appealed to me, I said, "I'll spend $5 on floss and just get some different colors."

And it made me happy picking it out. Perhaps part of it is the ghost of the memory of my childhood; for a few years there was still a shop in my hometown that made an effort to sell penny (and nickel, and quarter) candy - and not just typical grocery-store candy but some of the real old traditional things like Black Jacks and those chocolate babies. And I remember going to the store with my mom once in a while, and she'd give me a quarter or something, and I would take fifteen minutes (sometimes more!) figuring out how I'd spend that quarter.

There's a certain pleasure in being able to pick what you want, in being able to get "lots" for a little amount of money.

Probably some of the colors I chose will duplicate ones I already have; I don't really organize the floss by color or number like some people do. I keep it in one of those big plastic shoeboxes and have to hunt and dig a little when I'm looking for a color that I think will work. But there's also the element of serendipity in not-knowing exactly what you have; there's the chance to find something totally unexpected.

There's a book of poems out - called "The Very Stuff" by Stephen Beal. He wrote poems inspired by different colors of the floss. One of the neat things is that the color-number-code for each poem is given at the top of it, along with a little square printed in the color that the floss is.

Beal seems to favor reds; in fact, some of the reds he writes about in different poems (that have different numbers) do not look all that different to the eye.

Some of the poems are nice but some are a little eye-rolly for me; I get the feeling that "the gentleman doth protest too much" (the "I'm NOT gay, really, even though I'm writing about embroidery floss") because a lot of his poems are about women and his wanting to be with those women and his wanting to do certain things with those women. (I described one poem to a friend as being one that fantasized a "fatal Viagra moment" for the author that was brought on by a woman in a dress of a particular shade of red.)

Beal doesn't talk much about greens (other than one, apparently, that Rita Heyworth was meant to be dressed in). But green is my favorite, and the one I tend to buy the most of - because there are so many greens. There are the pale, baby leaf greens, almost yellow. Some of them almost glow in the dark they are so pale yet bright. And there are the soft gray sage greens - which is a color, incidentally, that I look good IN, which may be partly why I like it. And emerald green. And all of the blue-greens from teal to jade. To my eyes, green seems to be the color with the widest range of variation in what you would still call "green," with maybe only purple as a rival for this title.

And so, it is greens and purples I buy the most of. And some pinks and peaches and some browns (and brown, that is another good color, another color that can have forms that are redder and forms that are yellower and some forms that are even almost purple).

And I take my floss home and take it out of the bag and range them on my coffee table for a while, just to look at. And then I put them with the others, and plan to sometime soon pull one of them out, and use it - for the flower on a water-lily perhaps, or the scales on the Chinese dragon I stamped onto another tea towel, or to make stars in a night-scene.

There is something private and close about the colors of floss; I can hold them in my hand, they can belong to me. And I love that.