The Loops Came Home With the Needle

“Could I see the back of that?”

The landscape behind the craft-shop counter had a woolly hill, a cream sky and a tree with considerably better posture than anything I have made recently. I’d taken it for a tiny hooked rug. The owner turned it around, revealing neat, flat stitches where I’d expected something complicated.

Then she brought out a hollow needle.

Yarn went through the handle, down the shaft and through an eye near the point. She pushed it into fabric stretched over a demonstration frame, withdrew it and moved sideways. Underneath, another loop joined the hill.

My turn produced a loop too. Encouraged, I lifted the needle to inspect my achievement.

The loop came with it.

She lowered my hand towards the cloth. Between punches, the point needed to travel just above the surface. I had been giving each stitch a small ceremonial departure.

After a short stretch of supervised restraint, I had a row that remained attached when I stopped looking at it. This seemed adequate grounds for buying a kit.

At home, I passed over the supplied flower design and pencilled a square divided into coloured blocks. Straight boundaries, broad areas, corners. A modest programme. Cream, rust and dark blue looked good together while still wound into balls, giving the project an excellent opening position.

Stretching the backing took longer than drawing the square. The fabric supplied with the kit was monk’s cloth; tightening the hoop at one edge let another edge relax. Eventually it stopped yielding noticeably under the needle.

The first rust line stayed put. So did the second, until a section began shrinking behind my hand.

I punched it again. It shrank again.

Under my forearm, the yarn had become trapped against the table.

The Oxford Company’s explanation of how the loops hold helped here: there are no knots. The backing grips the yarn, and the packed loops help hold one another in place. Pull on the feeding yarn and that arrangement becomes vulnerable.

I drew a loose length from the ball and laid it beside the hoop. More tightening for the fabric; more freedom for the yarn.

That recalled the afternoon my loom weaving narrowed at the edge, when pulling the weft straight had deprived it of the length it needed to travel through the warp. Apparently I remain suspicious of spare yarn. Given any textile process, my first contribution is to remove its working allowance.

Once the feed stopped catching, I developed a rhythm. Push until the tool reached its stop, withdraw until the point cleared the cloth, skim sideways. The DMC stitch guide describes that shallow movement clearly. Reading it after the shop demonstration supplied useful confirmation that my hand was supposed to look this uneventful.

At a corner, the rhythm broke. Turning my wrist left the needle awkwardly oriented, and the next stitches crowded together.

June Gilbank’s punchneedle tutorial showed a better movement: leave the needle inserted and rotate the hoop. Keep the bevelled opening facing the direction of travel. The square became manageable once I allowed the square to turn.

Filling the blocks occupied the rest of the afternoon. Occasionally I flipped the hoop over and found a small carpet developing underneath. From above, the stitches were orderly enough. Below, neighbouring colours leaned into one another. Rust had acquired territory inside the cream.

Closer spacing seemed an obvious correction until the crowded patch became difficult to punch. Farther apart, the backing showed through. I worked across the blue area with an attention normally reserved for finding something dropped in grass.

By evening, the blocks were filled. A blunt point helped nudge some misplaced loops back across their pencilled boundary. Others resisted, or moved a neighbour instead.

From across the room, the sampler reads as a square. Held close, it contains a dense blue corner, a thin cream patch and a rust border that swells halfway along.

I put it beside the kit’s photograph, then moved the photograph back into the box.

The working side has some very good straight lines. I haven’t decided which side gets the wall.