Thursday, January 19, 2006-reprinted with permission

Light's right to keep guild in stitches

Bob Hill

But the opportunity was there. New York City, where the guild had been based, had become too expensive. So in the mid-1980s, Louisville chapter president Mary Julia Kuhn and a stitching friend, Ruth Whalen, went to a national meeting in St. Louis, where the guild's home was to be decided.

The women took along all sorts of happy data about Louisville -- letters and promises from all the right tourism people, hotel owners and Mayor-for-Life Jerry Abramson. But they needed that right closing pitch, that deal closer to keep Denver -- the main competition -- from sneaking off with the prize.

Kuhn mulled it over, thought about the one commodity most near and dear to any embroiderer's heart, and came up with the winner: The light is better in Louisville.

Which may be true only from April to October. But Denver never knew what hit them. And if somebody had asked Kuhn what makes the light better in Louisville, she had that answer too: The sun shines bright on my Old Kentucky Home.

Home, home, the Brown
So the national headquarters of The Embroiderers Guild of America was triumphantly moved to Louisville. Since 1989, it's been on the ground floor of the Brown Hotel, just past the long-coated doormen and to the right of the marble staircase; beautiful, quiet, elegant, filled with exquisite embroidery, open to all and virtually unknown -- another of the many, many best kept secrets in Louisville.

Such anonymity is richly undeserved: Honest meteorology notwithstanding, have you ever heard a better pitch than: The light is better in Louisville?

Even if you can't spell Carrickmacross -- i.e. Irish lace using applique with embroidery over machine-made net -- it's just fun to press your nose against the big guild window and gaze in fumble-fingered awe. Or you can just walk into the place free from 8:30 am to 5pm any weekday.

You just missed a show by Audrey Francini,, 89 considered the Madame Michelangelo of American embroidery. The current show is from America's Great Lakes region, including a five-piece folding panel that a woman named Margaret Barnes Glaser hand-stitched for 62 years; each six-foot panel representing one of her children -- the panels never to be divided.

For the record, the national guild has 16,000 members with 340 chapters in 13 regions. The Louisville chapter has about 120 members. It meets twice on the second Thursday of every month; morning and night; the latter for the working moms -- and dads. Additional information, http://www.egausa.org/ or by calling (502) 589-6956.

Our national headquarters offers classes, advice, encouragement, consolation, a 2,100-book library, a museum and filing cabinets stuffed with patterns. It has 800 works of historic embroidery -- each defined as being created with a needle with an eye in it -- carefully wrapped away in a climate-controlled room.

It has reams of information about Casalguidi embroidery, analogous color schemes, samplers, crazy quilts and crewel -- but not unusual -- punishment. And if it seems you can never get out of the house, there's even a cyberstitchers group to help promote this ancient art.

Using computer programs -- and sewing machines -- may seem like cheating to the uncultured layman, but it's not. Embroidery evolves like everything else.

My favorite national headquarters piece was a 1,200-year-old Islamic calendar; just imagine where it's been. Then there was the Adam and Eve' sampler done in 1789 by a 7-year-old girl and a flowing, minutely detailed, mid-American landscape stitched from 60 analogous colors.

The light was perfect.