A Tale of Two Waggers

 I love dogs. In my life, I think I’ve met only a few that I didn’t cotton to right away. I like them in all shapes and sizes and colors and personalities, but I am especially partial to those who cock their heads a certain way and regard me with curiosity upon meeting me, reserving judgement until they’ve had a chance to get to know me. Because sometimes, they need to think about whether I can come into their circle or not, and I respect that. 

I recently wrote a post about my friend’s sweet foxhound Abbylicious, and she was like that.  My niece’s dog Chuckie is like that, although his sister Lucy is made of flat-out sweet sugar love and will welcome you with open paws. Unlike most people, I don’t have a wish that dogs could talk because I honestly think they’re a better species than we are and if they could talk, they’d tell us what they really think of us and I don’t think I can handle that. They would probably tell us they do still love us, after they’ve been really honest about how dumb we are. I hope they would still love us.

It may surprise you to know that I don’t live with a dog right now. That’s by choice, because I need to wait until I have the time and resources that a dog deserves. I live alone at the moment, work full-time and I just kinda have a lot going on so it doesn’t feel right, right now. But it will feel right again, and I’m looking forward to that. The only thing better than snuggling up with a doggie is snuggling up with a tired toddler.

This is a tale of two dogs that I’ve never actually met, but I know them very well because I know their mom. Wait, I take it back - I did meet one of them, but it was very briefly, in a car, and he was having a bad day. I think we mutually agreed to pretend it never happened. So I can’t really say that I’m in their circle, but I do love them. Just from a distance. This is a story about Jameson and Charles and the time I decided to paint their portrait with thread and needle.

Their mom is my friend Caleigh. I love Caleigh. We clicked immediately when we met at work in Rochester several years ago. Caleigh is in her mid-twenties: tall, willowy, stylish, gorgeous, smart and wicked funny. I am almost none of those things. We bonded over feminism, Frida Kahlo and our mutual love for and ability to Snort Laugh. If you’ve ever seen Schitt’s Creek, Caleigh is Alexis except way smarter, deeper, kinder. 

Jameson and Charles live with Caleigh and her partner David, and they all belong to each other. As I write this, a beautiful black setter named Lady has joined the pack, but at the time of this story it was just Jameson and Charles. Jameson is also a black Irish Setter. Jameson has a pronounced overbite and a thrilling ability to taunt his mother while she is at work watching him misbehave on the pet-cam. Charles is a multi-color but mostly black and white...Charles. Charles has one lopsided ear (he doesn’t like to talk about it) and a strong sense of self-preservation in that he just gets outta the way when Jameson is misbehaving so that he can, in all honestly, later be able to state that he had nothing to do with it.

One day, Caleigh sent me this picture...

I mean, have you ever seen such expressions? I decided then and there that I would try to recreate this as an embroidered something. Never mind that I’d never attempted an embroidery from a photo or my own design. Pshaw! How hard could it be?

The answer was, oh boy. I started by printing the photo and tracing it onto transfer paper, then did a whole bunch of re-sizing. It’s just as well I took no photos of that process because it was a giant pain in the butt and I don’t want to relive it. In every creative process, there’s always a “least favorite” step that usually translates into “I really hate this part”. When I make a quilt, for instance, that step is spreading out all the layers and basting the bottom, batting and top together, especially with big quilts. In baking, it’s the clean-up. On embroidery projects, it’s transferring a design to the fabric. A light box helps, but for this project my fabric was a lightweight denim - too dark to trace through even with a light box.

I ended up using sort of a hybrid pin-prick and carbon-paper-stylus method. I ended up with at least a faint outline of the photo on the fabric, and then I just went back over it with a plain old #2 lead pencil. Very trial and error, far from perfect. There are approximately 18 million books, videos and/or blog posts about how to transfer designs onto fabric. This is obviously not one of them. I taped the color photo on the wall near my stitching chair for reference. And for inspiration to persevere, as it turned out.

Once I got the fabric in the hoop and started stitching, Problem Number Two presented itself: how do I stitch a dog that’s completely black - deeeeeep black - and not have him just show up like an oil slick? I wrestled with shades of gray for nuance and definition, but he’s a young dog and I didn’t want him to look gray. This is kinda how it went...

Again, not perfect. For whatever reason, I’m just one of those people who has to figure out how to do things by feel, by just doing it. Let’s just say there were a LOT of ripped-out stitches. I never did get to the point where I was happy with his nose, but there’s that old saying “Sometimes finished is better than perfect.” And even denim has its limits on how much floss-ripping-out it can expected to put up with before it will just lie down and die.

Oooh, funny sidebar: a stitcher walks into a Joann’s fabric store and buys all the black floss they have, dumps it out on the counter in front of the cashier.

Cashier:  “Umm, whatcha working on?”

Me:  “A picture of a dog. A black dog. A really big, really black dog.”

Cashier:  “Uh-huh. That’s a lot of floss.”

Me: “Yep.”

Cashier:  “You took all of it, didn’t you?”

Me:  “Possibly. I’m not sure. Is there more in the back? Because if there is, then no I didn’t take it all, but I am gonna need that, whatever’s back there.”

Cashier:  “Sigh.”

Moving on to Charles! You will note that in the finished product, his name is stitched as Charlie, because he was Charlie for a brief time. Then he grew into himself and became Charles.

The dilemma with Charles was a) his ear, and b) his curly bits. Should I give him a full left ear in this, his official portrait, restoring his ear-dignity? I ultimately decided to stitch it as it was, in all its magnificently perfect imperfection. Look at his bearing, look into those eyes, he IS dignified! Except when he’s eating his own poop, but that of course has no bearing whatsoever here. As for the curly bits? French knots to the rescue! Lots and lots and lots of eensy weensy french knots.

So no, I didn’t think it was perfect, but I was pretty happy with it and I learned a lot about mixing colors, shadowing, different stitches for fur and working on facial expressions. I made it into a pillow...

...and gave it to Caleigh as a late Christmas gift. She liked it very much. I don’t know if Jameson and Charles liked it, because they weren’t allowed to play with it. I doubt they thought much of it at all, because they were so very busy being dogs. Brothers, doggie buddies, waggly, rambunctious and gorgeous Good Boys.

If you are lucky enough to have fur babies in your life, give them a snuggle and kiss from me.

❤️ Bonnie