I grew up surrounded by stitchers. I never had a store-bought pair of mittens – and very few sweaters not hand made – until I left home. My mother and my paternal aunts, among whom we lived back when I was a small child, were always knitting, crocheting, cross-stitching, or embroidering something. My mom used to take very fine colored thread and crochet beautiful lace edgings on linen handkerchiefs to give as gifts. She made a crazy quilt of her old dresses and my and my brother’s old summer clothing. I can remember searching among the patches on the quilt for an old sunsuit and my mother’s best Sunday dress – I was probably four or five years old. The quilt was lost in a house fire, along with almost everything else we owned.
Every grownup female I knew stitched.
So you’d think I’d have picked up a needle as a child and never put it down. And you’d be wrong. I was a tomboy, I wanted to run around outdoors, climb trees, play Indians (never was much interested in cowboys, I liked the Indians), catch frogs and turtles, build snowmen. My indoor interests lay mostly in books. I was an early reader and remain an avid one. My mother tried to teach me to knit, but I wasn’t interested.
And it turns out this was a good thing!
Reading a book with technical details in it can be difficult if you don’t share the technical level of the author. My technical level in needlework consisted of threading a needle. Oh, and I had some pretensions to French knots. That is, I knew what they were, and about half the time I tried, I could make one.
But when I was asked to write a series of needlework mysteries I was so flattered at being approached I said, “Sure!” Then, coming to my senses, I started asking around. How hard is it to pick up needlework techniques? And it was proved to me that stitchers are liars, every one of them!
“Oh, it’s easy!” they’d declare with a straight face. “If you can count to five you can do Handanger.” Lies, lies! It isn’t easy and despite three classes in it, I still can’t do Hardanger.
But by the time I realized this, I’d already signed a book contract. Then it came to pass that my lack of expertise was actually an asset. Non-stitchers weren’t confronted by language they couldn’t understand, beginning stitchers sometimes picked up a hint or two they could use, and advanced stitchers could enjoy the feeling of superiority – or sympathy – with the rank beginner character I was forced to create and use.
The problem: I am becoming more familiar and at ease with needlework. Not by any means an advanced stitcher – I am too busy writing the novels to get really serious about needlework – I am no longer the scared novice I was at the start. So far it doesn’t seen to have put off my readers. Perhaps they start at the beginning and progress with me.
About Monica Ferris
Mary Monica is an “accidental Hoosier” – Terre Haute, Indiana, had the nearest meternity hospital to her parents’ Marshall, Illinois, home. She grew up in Illinois and Wisconsin, then served six and a half years in the U.S. Navy before attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She married Dr. Albert W. Kuhfeld in 1979 and moved to join him in Minneapolis.
Mary Monica sold her first short story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1983, and has since sold more than two dozen short stories to various anthologies and magazines, including some in Germany, England and France. Her latest short story appeared in Silence of the Loons.
Her first mystery novel, Murder at the War, appeared from St. Martin’s Press in 1987 and was nominated for an Anthony as Best First Novel. Four mystery novels in the Peter Brichter series followed, then Berkley published six medieval mysteries writen in collaboration with Gail Frazer under the pseudonym Margaret Frazer. The Servant’s Tale was nominated for an Edgar as Best Original Paperback of 1993.
In 1998 Mary Monica began writing a new series for Berkley featuring a needleworking sleuth. The titles are: Crewel World, Framed in Lace, A Stitch in Time, Unraveled Sleeve, A Murderous Yarn, Hanging by A Thread, Cutwork, Crewel Yule, Embroidered Truths, Sins and Needles, Knitting Bones, and Thai Die. She has finished Blackwork and has begun Buttons and Bones.
Mary Monica studies the medieval period as an amateur, and does needlework. She collects (and wears) exuberant hats.
For cover pictures, sample chapters, and pictures of Mary Monica in some of her hats, go to Monica-Ferris.com.
One thing I really do wish, is that I could take a year off writing to take classes and stitch, stitch, stitch! Because, after all those years of avoiding it, I have discovered that I love the creativity, the sense of meditation, the feeling of accomplishment I find in the needle arts!
