We are allowed to take our stitcheries-in-progress home, if we choose, and I do, so that I can continue my contemplative work. My mother admires it but doesn’t know what it represents; I tell her I see my design as a kind of sky. She suggests that I consider switching to a landscape: sky over the desert mountains, saguaros. I add a saguaro in green floss, its twin arms happily poking up at heaven, and take it to school next day, but Miss Tynes is disappointed. Why restrict yourself to the limitations of tired representation, she suggests, in some other words which are lost to me now, when you have the whole spectrum of this luscious stuff to play with? The yarns themselves can tell you what to do; who needs the stiff strictures of material reality to define the province of art?

Object of the month: a swirling jimsonweed by Georgia O’Keeffe, like a petticoat on a laundry line, filmy nylon in a slow whirlwind. I cover my saguaro over with swirls and drifts, paisley shapes, rippled and dotted intricacies of silk.