BoomerGirl.com

Chicago — On a cool summer's night, on a leafy side street, I did what the sidewalk sign told me: I followed the arrow, climbed down the stairs to The Needle Shop.

The stairwell couldn't have been more, well, uninspiring. It was hot, humid, hardly the place to pull thread through a cloth, to stitch whimsy where there'd been none.

Ah, but then I pulled back a curtain. Then I felt the cool breeze of a summer night's fan. All around me, the room was aswirl with color and pattern.

I'd signed up for Embroidery 101 at the 2-year-old school that's tucked out of the way in Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood - the school that believes we all can find joy, can find purpose, with swatches of fabric and needles and thread.

It had been years since I pressed cloth on a hoop, stitched a long row of X's, sewed a picture, a word, even a bit of a sampler. And then, of course, there was that long ago night in the emergency room, with the needle impaled through my nailbed. I get a bit antsy around needles sometimes.

But Caitlin Thomas, the teacher, couldn't have been more inviting, more encouraging. Couldn't have more delightfully eased all my worries.

"This is just a basic class to get you started. We'll hold your hand while you're freaked out with all of what's new," she told the four of us there in the room, as I sat down to my pile of presents: a mound of threads in a rainbow of colors, a hoop, a packet of needles, a practice square of white flour-sack cloth, a tea towel to stitch what tickled my fancy. Even my own little scissors.

"Embroidery has a huge history. Thousands of years. Women do it every day. What we do here is take the rules out of it. Do whatever you want. Make yourself happy. If you looked through an embroidery book, they'd tell you your thread has to be exactly this long, you have to do this. All these steps that have to be followed. We don't want to scare people off. This is more free form. Whatever works for you."

By day, Thomas is a help desk analyst and data steward at a company in suburban Gurnee, Ill. I think that means she keeps gobs of gigabytes in her head, spews them out whenever there's trouble. She oozes unflappability. Makes it contagious. It would be darn tough to get tied up in knots when she's the one pulling the threads.

And so, we dove in. Undaunted. Picked up the hoop, learned just how to make it taut like a drum, how to line up the weave so it wasn't contorted. "Make sure it's not doing some weird warpy thing," cautioned Thomas. "You don't want it too droopy."

Got the lowdown on thread (in the world of embroidery, you will refer to it, please, as "the floss," not to be confused, of course, with the white waxy string you thread between teeth after chomping an apple).

Moved on to threading the needle: "Spit and smush" was the mantra there. And, for the most part, that's all it took. And more and more luck as the night wore on and our eyeballs wore out.

The Needle Shop, the brainchild of Rachel Epperson, who has a degree in fashion design, has been sewing for 25 years and taught at a similar studio in San Francisco before moving to Chicago, believes teaching should be intimate (classes are usually no bigger than four students), relaxing (a refrigerator is stocked with bottles of water and juices), and refreshing (listen in, you'll catch the drift).

This is not your mother's Home Ec 101, where the severe seamstress roams the aisles, slapping wrists with a ruler. This feels more like gathering in someone's fab sewing room, taking your pick of the floss, flipping through page after page of adorable, often retro, line drawings, all of which you are free to cut out and iron onto the tea towel you'll be carrying home when class, sadly, must come to an end.

But first, it's time for the sampler, which is embroidery talk for a hodgepodge, a little of this, a little of that, threads in circles and squares and speckles of knots.

Off and running

Thomas takes us through the stitches. Patiently, clear-headedly, she has even a fumble fingers like me poking needle through cloth in just the right places. In swift order, she takes us through an alphabet of embroidery basics: the running stitch, double running stitch, back stitch, chain stitch, square chain stitch, blanket stitch, couching.

And the three I could devote the rest of my days to: seed stitch (think freckles or spots on a butterfly wing), satin stitch (rather like brush strokes with floss, filling in vast fractions of inches with solid swaths of whatever color you choose) and that knot of all knots, the French knot ("an adorable little cinnamon bun," chirped my tablemate, Julie Vassilatos, whose imagination is vast and poetic).

Once stitched, it was time for that tea towel. First, we were sent to the ironing boards. You don't want a wrinkle barging in on your blanket stitch, Thomas informed, a basic that might have escaped me.

Since we'd flipped earlier through the books of iron-on transfers (again, embroidery talk for what you might call the stencil, the pattern, the tracing), I knew I was headed for old-fashioned flowers and vines, loop-de-looping all over my towel.

Thomas generously did the cutting of transfers from books with her name on them. I had the feeling she was sharing the very pages of her treasured embroidery books with a table full of not-long-ago strangers. The Needle Shop is like that. Feels more like a sewing circle, less like a school. Only you walk out way smarter than when you walked in. In the notions department, that is.

I had one last trip to the ironing board, to heat up my tea towel so it would soak up the ink of the transfer. Then, with Thomas showing me first, I pressed iron to transfer to towel, and, voila, the meandering vines were all mine.

As I sat to start me a tea towel, daunted by so many vines, I feared I might soon be tangled. The leaves looked unending. I'd transferred a jungle, I gulped.

Before I could choke, though, I took the plunge. Twisted my floss `round my needle, then poked through the cloth. It was a French knot, and I was triumphant.

But then, Thomas looked uncharacteristically ruffled. "Do you want to put that on your hoop?" she inquired.

Oops. I'd gotten the knot. But I'd forgotten the hoop. And the No. 1 Embroidery Basic, even at the school with no rules: Thou Shall Not Abandon the Hoop. Without it, it's simply sewing. With it, it's art in the making.

Who should take this class: Anyone in need of a little stitch therapy. Anyone hankering for an old-fashioned sampler with new-fangled coolness. Anyone whose world is a little too theoretical, a little too hard to point to at the end of the day and say, "I did this." You'll see that sweet row of stitches and think, "Oh, geez, look what I just accomplished."

Who should not take this class: Those who need rules.

Overall assessment: What's not to love about leaving your cares at the top of the stairs, sinking into the world of needle and thread? It's not hard. And it might be addictive.