Since finishing most of the work for my book I’ve had more time in the past weeks for other projects and experiments. It’s a relief in a way but also a weird state of uncertainty. What to do now that I’m not thigh-high in Misery?

I have had a go at a couple books I’ve worked with before, including The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. It can be a fun one, but also exasperatingly dry. And the text in my copy is tiny. I adore the capitalizations, though. 

I’ve also poked around in Ali Smith’s The Accidental again. It’s such a wonderful, imaginative book. And that’s the problem. She’s kicked everyone’s ass before they even got there. Courage is required.

This weekend, instead of traveling, I committed to teach myself basic embroidery stitches, with the idea of incorporating embroidery into a found poem or two. I’ve taken a normal needle and thread to the page before, also for Misery. I printed instructions and navigated the mission for equipment (hoop, floss and needles) in Spanish (aro, hilo y agujas). There were so many colors of floss, which was wonderful but also overwhelming. Then I found small bundles that looked like some smart person had combined a selection of harmonious colors. It turned out the bundles were all one strand whose color changed at intervals. That wasn’t what I wanted but it was still fine to work with. Otherwise, embroidering was easier than I expected.

I gave it a whirl with a couple pages from a Japanese novella, complete with coffee stains. After a night of embroidering thick paper, my fingers were killing me (and I fear I’ve injured a tooth, having resorted to pulling the needle through with my teeth at times. Pray for me.) So this morning I zeroed in on pages with little text, and embroidered through the unwanted words. In one I used the backstitch, in the other the split stitch. Nothing fancy. 

I’m looking forward to experimenting further, also in collage. Most important is making it look right, not like an awkward, alien thing that doesn’t belong.