This past weekend several of us from NJNA were invited to join the Monmouth Chapter EGA at their annual stitching retreat at a hotel in Voorhees, NJ.  We went down on Friday afternoon stopping first at the Nimble Needle in Haddonfield where we browsed, found threads for projects, found new things we could not do without and generally had fun.  Karen, the owner, is a delight to work with helping with finding things or suggesting stitches to use, or picking out the ideal thread.  From there we went to the hotel about twenty minutes away.  Monmouth Chapter had a large meeting room set aside for us from three on Friday to four on Sunday.   You could find someone in there stitching from 7:30 in the morning until 11 at night!

From NJNA Tina finished four pieces that had been languishing at home waiting for the final few hours of work!  Then she began working on another needlepoint piece that needed several days of work but did come out of the dark for work to begin again.  Ada was thwarted in working on her Japanese work but had brought some other pieces and almost completed the background on a winter piece after receiving suggestions for a good stitch from others gathered around.  She also completed the stitching of another small piece.  And I completed the stitching I needed to do for a piece being offered at Friends of Counted  Thread, began Bali Hai unsuccessfully and then worked on Sisters from seminar with very good results.

It was so much fun to see what others had brought to stitch with them.  One woman had been in Linda’s class from the previous weekend and was working on that.  Another brought a Ton Mineri piece that she had set aside for several years and can now see the end in sight.  An interesting bit was that a section had been stitched with a plated silver thread which had tarnished in the intervening years.  It would have been impossible to remove or clean but outlining the section in a dark thread did make that section show up, rather than recede into the piece.  One woman made a beaded bracelet before moving on to needlepoint.  A cute York Peppermint Patty ornament was completed and the next, a Hershey bar was begun. Others made great advances on a single piece of cross stitch or needlepoint or knitting or moved from one piece to another. But stitching with others gave us companionship, many laughs, suggestions or encouragement when needed. of course, there was food involved with many trees available for snacking or dessert all day.   All in all a wonderful weekend!

working diligently