Don’t give me what I want, give me what I need

I got my new embroidery books last night. I don't know what I'd do in Japan without Amazon.co.jp. I ordered those books what, five days ago and they're already here? Very nice. Anyway, on to the books.

The books are 18^th Century Embroidery Techniques, 19^th Century Embroidery Techniques, and Beginner's Guide to Goldwork, but my first reaction was disappointment. I flipped through the 19^th century embroidery techniques book (and it was full of history! Pictures of canvas embroidery! Pictures of the sewing kits used in the 19^th century! It isn't a technique book at all. Obviously, the 18^th century book is the same. Why, oh why did I buy these books, I lamented. I'm not interested in the historical aspects of embroidery! While the door isn't closed on costuming, I'm not currently interested in it. As nice as it is to look at a picture of an embroidered muslin dress from the 1800s I don't feel the need to try to recreate the dress. What a waste of money. The goldwork book looks more useful, but the first section of it talks about how goldwork is made to be displayed, since the gold tarnishes and flakes if used or washed. Well, that doesn't work for me at all! As I stated before I don't like doing things that are purely for display. None of these books are useful to me at all!

I continued to flip through the books dispiritedly. Maybe there isn't any point, I thought. Maybe if you're interested in embroidery you have to get into the historical and religious stuff. Maybe there isn't a way to do embroidery without going through preordained paths. Suddenly something caught my eye in the 19^th Century book; a detailed description and definition of couching, something I'd been wondering about for a while now. It also went into detail about something even more useful to me, when and why you should use couching. I hadn't yet figured out exactly what the point of couching was, and here's this book telling me straight out! It got me thinking about what the principal of Southside said about the value of knowing where things come from. If you don't know where something came from then you can't really wrap your head around it sufficiently. You'll either spend time reinventing the wheel or you'll have gaping holes in your knowledge. If you look at the fish and the vampire I've used Bokhara and Roumanian couching, but I had no idea what made them couching as opposed to something else. I was like a kid mindlessly repeating something from a song in a foreign language with no understanding of what the words meant.

I chose those books because they were highly recommended by Mary Colbert and I thought they were technique books. If I had known what the books were about ahead of time I would have bought technique books instead, because that's what I wanted. I wanted new techniques so that I could sew new things. That's not what I need, though. I need to understand the fundamentals of this craft. I need to understand why you do a certain stitch here instead of there, and why such and such is used instead of this other thing. It's doesn't give immediate gratification like a technique book would, but it's more useful in the long run. Contrary to yesterday I'm quite happy to have these books now.

It's actually pretty lucky. If they had been technique books I would be all inspired to start a new project despite being in the middle of the baby vampire. It would have taken all of the enjoyment out of the current project and made me rush. So this whole thing has been a blessing in disguise! Baby Vampire says "blehhhh, thanks for not rushing me and screwing something up in the 11^th hour, blehhhhhh. All things happen for a reason.