The Drowning Spool (A Needlecraft Mystery) Read Free Page A

Look on the shaft for a white line. That line shows the direction you should be stitching.”
    Betsy went to each woman, checking her work. She was leaning over one of her students when the door to the library slammed open.
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute!” shouted the shrill voice of an old woman. “Start over!”

Two

    T HE women at the table all looked at Betsy to see what she would do. “Come in, Mrs. Carter,” she said. “I have a kit for you, sit down and take a look at it.” She turned to the others. “Now, where were we?”
    Mrs. Carter made a production out of coming to the table. She pulled out a chair, sat down with a thump, opened her kit, and spread the contents widely in front of her, poking at the lap stand parts, uncapping the glass tube that held the needle and threader and spilling them out. “What’s all this stuff?” she demanded.
    “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Betsy said, kindly but firmly. She turned to the others. “Remember to stay inside the lines, and to make little stitches in parallel lines without overlapping,” she said. Then she went to Mrs. Carter and said, “Now, do you know anything about punch needle?”
    “Of course not, otherwise why would I be here?” Her tone was sharp, but then she winked, drew up her shoulders, and giggled.
    She needed some help assembling the lap stand, but stretched the practice fabric on the smaller hoop with no trouble. She could in no way understand how to thread the punch needle with floss, but after Betsy did it for her, she began punching through the fabric with enthusiasm. “Yippee!”
    “Slow down, slow down,” counseled Betsy, then left her to it and went back to the others, praising their work, suggesting narrower lines to some and shorter stitches to others. Now and again one of them would turn the lap stand over and exclaim with pleasure at the look of the growing field of tight loops, sometimes stroking them with a gentle finger.
    But when Betsy got back to Mrs. Carter, she found that she had begun to punch at random, twisting the punch needle so that it wasn’t laying down the loops evenly, occasionally lifting the needle so far up that it was pulling loops out and leaving loose floss on the back of her fabric.
    “This is fun!” exclaimed Mrs. Carter, holding up her work for examination.
    “I can see you are enjoying yourself,” Betsy said, noting that the random sprawl of loops had wandered from one heart to the other and even into the background. The woman smiled broadly and resumed attacking the fabric with rapid, irregular thrusts.
    “Perhaps if you punched a little more slowly,” Betsy began.
    “Betsy, I’m about to run out of floss already,” said Dot, surprised.
    “Yes, that’s the one big problem with punch needle,” said Betsy, abandoning Mrs. Carter to her craft and going to the speaker. “It goes through floss at an amazing rate. You just let it come close to running out, pull up on the working side to empty your needle, and rethread to continue. If the needle empties on the front, go back to the last stitch and pry it up gently—very gently—with your needle so the loose end is on the back.”
    Betsy had to go around the class and reteach everyone how to thread the needle. It was a counterintuitive process; Betsy had had to resort to the instruction booklet repeatedly herself to learn it.
    By this time Mrs. Carter had lost her threader, and three minutes’ searching failed to turn it up. Fortunately, Betsy had brought along half a dozen extra ones, though she took care not to let her students see that, lest they get careless.
    “I have an idea,” said an observant knitter at the other end of the table, seeing Betsy about to slip a new threader to Mrs. Carter.
    “What’s that?” asked Betsy.
    “I have a refrigerator magnet in my bag. I drop needles often—and it’s very dangerous to step on one with bare feet—and the magnet is useful in locating them. Maybe if we ran it over the floor