It was the perfect end to the holiday season.
Come Monday morning, I knew that the time had come to take down the hastily-prepared and seldom-enjoyed Christmas decorations, but I didn’t want to. This year, the Christmas season didn’t seem very holiday-ish. Everything went by in a blur. So, early that morning, I found myself thinking that I don’t really want to end Christmas just yet. “We need to do something to mark the season here at work,” I said to myself. Something aside from slapping up some last-minute decor and then squishing it all away into a box, forgotten until next year.
I didn’t know what to do, so I put on some light Christmas jazz and started the day, Christmas lights twinkling in the window and the world madly rushing by once more according the expected rhythm of life.
The sun rose and the morning commute traffic slowed down. The Christmas lights turned off. I turned down the music. Anna arrived for work. We turned our attention to making a gazillion twists of thread while planning the next few months.
The clock ticked towards noon.
And then it happened! A First in the history of Needle ‘n Thread! And when I think about it, the perfect end to the holiday season!
What happened, you ask?
Why, the Floss Truck arrived!
Just before noon, we heard a knock on the shipping door (which happens to be the only door that’s unlocked during the day – long story for another time!).
And in walked Patricia and her husband Ed, from North Carolina! Our very first visitors to our new studio (or our old one, for that matter), outside of my own family members and a local friend or two.
Not being used to out of town visitors that I’ve only “met” online, I am sorely kicking myself for not taking pictures! It was a landmark event, after all! First Visitors!
Patricia and Ed are a lovely and vivacious couple from North Carolina who have family in the Kansas City area and were traveling between KC and Wilson Lake in north central Kansas.
Patricia makes these fabulous little Floss Trucks for her stitching friends. They are cleverly conceived tractor-trailers of wood.
The cargo is precious to any stitcher! A cargo of floss, wound onto the wooden bobbins that fit the trailer perfectly.
Wind your current project’s colors onto the bobbins, fill up the trailer, prop the trailer on your work station, and you have a handy and unique storage system for your threads while you stitch!
It’s inventive and really, really cute!
I can’t wait to set up my next project’s threads on here and put the Floss Truck to good use.
Of course, it’s front and center on my cubby wall in the meantime!
Anna and I had a great visit with Patricia and Ed! We found out that they – and many of Patricia’s stitching friends (knitters and quilters) – live in the same vicinity as my own sister in North Carolina, and that they frequent the same knitting and quilting shops. Small world! We also found out some rather intriguing things we didn’t know about Kansas. For example, Wilson Lake (a reservoir about 2.5 hours west of us) is worth a visit. But better yet, we found out that Lucas, Kansas, just north of Wilson, has some rather uncommon and humorously delightful restroom facilities. Definitely the stuff of road trip destinations. Who knew?!
Thank you so much, Patricia, for the Floss Truck, but even more, for the personal delivery! It was so much fun to meet you and Ed!
My friends, you might think I’m strangely enthusiastic about this meeting. The truth is, we haven’t had much of a chance to meet folks involved in the Needle ‘n Thread community face-to-face over the years.
I am now even more motivated to move along our studio plans so that we can have regular times where people can drop in by appointment. Even if it’s just for a short chat, it’s a great way to meet people and put faces to names! It’s so important to connect to people face to face, I think. It’s not always possible, true. But interaction between real people with common interests is part of what it means to be human – and it’s a very healthy thing!
Our visitors were the perfect end to the holiday season and the perfect beginning of a New Year!
