My Backside!

That's my backside!  The backside of my frog embroidery, that is.

When I embroider, I don't worry about the backside--much. I worry, when I embroider towels, about stiching so that traveling stitches won't snag on anything. (Traveling stitches are the stitches on the back that get you from one part of the embroidery to the other. You can see a lot of them in that photo, mostly in blue.) I sometimes worry about a dark color showing through the light colored fabric. But that's it.

Some stitchers never make knots because it makes the front kind of lumpy. There are a number of advanced techniques that allow you to begin and end without tying knots. But I don't care about that. I like making knots and they're useful, so I make them. Some stitchers are so careful that their backsides look almost the same as their fronts. I don't care about that either.

When I was a little girl, one of the things I loved most about the embroidered kitchen towels that my grandmother had was, yes, that they were well-used and useful things, but that they bore the mark of the maker. In an increasingly manufactured landscape, these were things that someone had taken the time to beautify by hand, and even as a little girl that impressed me. Turning them over to examine their backsides was part of the wonderfulness of the thing.