If you have been reading my blog (OK, my rants) from their beginnings last March, you know that I am not a fan of this fascination everyone in my *needlepoint world* has with ever more difficult stitches.

I have “peppered” today’s blog with drawings of some of the fancy stitches I found on the excellent Stitchopedia Web Site, it is an excellent resource. There is no plan to the stitches I selected, I just took ones that looked reasonably complicated (to make my point, of course).

I just received an email from my friend Janet Perry, asking me to look at a proposal that is being made, to instruct and attract younger stitchers to needlepoint by Ruth Schmuff in her blog “Not Your Grandmother’s Needlepoint”

I see the point and it is an interesting one.

I also see a few obstacles to the premise.

It pre-supposes that most people have a *walls & doors* needlepoint store as a focal point and a destination and that a stitcher needs this kind of handholding or that a begninng stitcher should be pressured to master some of these ultra fussy stitches.

This, of course, gets into one of my *open sore* areas. I see our lovely art of needlepoint descending into a “championship race into ever increasingly difficult stitches”.

I fear *we* , as a needlepoint community are losing touch with the simple beauty of the threads, colors, designs etc, that needlepoint used to be all about, before it was swamped by the “fancy stitch monster”.

I know I have not set foot in an actual needlepoint store in almost a year. I know of none anywhere within an hour of me. To expect anyone, especially the suggested “busy young single mother” to have the time to trek over and over to the needlepoint store, is unrealistic and forgive me, elitist.

I don’t know when all this started with stitch guides, why every canvas has to have one now.

When I began my first needlepoint, I bought an Erhman Kit, it had zero instructions. It had a canvas and a hank of yarns, that’s it.

I still have that piece, it was a chicken with a lovely border. It came out really very well, without all this fuss.

Maybe the answer lies in not complicating our art even more, maybe in simplifying it.

There can be levels of these canvases or kits, some for beginners, some for expert stitchers.

I took some advice from a marketing expert, someone I knew socially, when I began my web store and added a beginner and an expert category, grouping my existing kits according to skill level needed.

I offer my kits with a color placement guide, which is a picture of the design with markings where each color belongs. What stitch to do is the stitchers choice, not dictated by me. This is not to say that it all should be done in Tent or Basketweave Basic stitches. I just am not telling you what stitch to use, it is a choice you should make or choose not to make, and stay with basic stitches. (I should not admit this, but I often choose just that in my own, personal, stitching)

Anything special needed to do my design or canvas is noted by me in my directions, again without the need for a stitch by stitch guide telling you where, what and how for each hole in the canvas.

This, it seems to me, to be enough. There has been this self-created mania over *stitch guides* with barely existed several years ago, now everything’s supposed to have them.

I guess my analogy is *Restless Leg Syndrome*. It used to not be a disease, now there are drugs, ads on TV and you are supposed to “ask your doctor”. This is an invented illness, which now exists in the public’s consciousness becasue there is a drug the drug companies want to sell to us. It is like the many new *holidays* invented by the Greeting Card Companies to sell us cards (Secretary’s Day?) or the new push to make giving presents necessary at Easter as well as at Christmas.

This is how I feel about stitch guides.

I know I am a lone voice out here talking about this. I just hate seeing such a simple and wonderfully relaxing art as needlepoint become this over-complicated, competitive, fussy and exacting discipline.

If we want younger people to stitch, maybe instead of segmenting the stitch guides, we should think about making needlepoint accessible. Doing needlepoint and watching movies is one of my favorite ways to relax and spend an evening. Having to manage an exacting stitch, over and over, while peering at a stitch guide, is not relaxing.

I also read the wonderful Spinster Stitcher needlepoint blog. She has been complaining lately that she just does not sit in her “happy chair” and get much stitching done these days, she feels guilty about this. Is it possible that is not just because she is busy or distracted? Could it be we (as a needlepoint community) have made needlepoint too difficult to be enjoyable?

Maybe, just maybe, we have all gone too far with all this fuss?