"I remember reading, years ago, that Jane Austen was asked to write a serious romance and responded that she simply couldn’t write anything if she couldn’t relax into laughing. And that really resonated with me because I have to find delight in a design, or it just doesn’t work for me”
Jeannine McGowan - Cross stitch designer behind The Blue Flower Stitching is one of CGT’s favourite people.
When Cottage Garden Thread's Katie, Pam and Mia travelled to Nashville for the Needlework Market early this year it was a delight to finally meet this wonderful human in person and discover that Jeannine would be their neighbour for the weekend. But the Nashville schedule kept everyone so busy that there wasn’t any time to sit down with Jeannine and have what we Australians would call a ‘good old yarn’. All that time would allow was fleeting conversations during set up, one of which to borrow a stapler. Said stapler was packed up in the CGT suitcases and now sits in Katie’s desk drawer, waiting to catch up with Jeannine next year and finally have that yarn!
Recently we reached out to Jeannine on a Zoom call to Nevada. And there she was, on the screen in her home office just as she appears in her Flosstube videos, with her pet greyhounds sprawled on the floor beside her.
Those of you familiar with Jeannine’s Flosstube will easily be able to picture her smiling face. It is no exaggeration to say that she is one of those rare people whose joy and exuberance is infectious.
Jeannine remembers being taught cross stitch first by her mother when she was child, though there were few opportunities to be creatively inspired in a small town in rural Montana. Like so many of us, she dropped cross stitch for years before re-discovering it as an adult and making it her own thing.
In Jeannine’s case, the impetus came while recovering from a respiratory illness which kept her immobile for weeks. By then she was married and living in Portland Oregon and, when she recovered her health enough to go looking for needlework supplies, she stumbled into the iconic Acorns and Threads store and the rest is history.
“I remember walking into the store for the first time and being absolutely blown away by all the threads and fabrics and the amazing models”, she says.
It wasn’t long before Jeannine began stitching her own variations into the designs she was sourcing through Acorns and Threads. When they spied what she was doing, she was encouraged to start designing.
“I would never have done it if they hadn’t [acknowledged me] – and not just saying ‘you can be a designer’. From the moment you go into the shop, they’re so supportive – they say: there are no cross-stitch police… no one’s going to come and tell you that you’re doing it wrong. (It’s) really nice to hear that you can change colours and they’re right with you saying – try this or that’s a great idea…..it was so important”.
For a person so engaged with the idea that people matter regardless of their differences, it’s striking to hear that Jeannine grew up inside a small closed fundamentalist Christian community.
“It’s only in retrospect I’ve come to see this. As a child you just think it’s normal. But it would have been awfully nice to have had exposure to other people and other ideas. It’s one of the reasons I get so excited about that now”.
The eldest of six children, she was naturally an introvert and a loner. ‘Functionally alone’ is the way she describes it. “I’ve always been a fringe person. A person more comfortable around books and animals than people. My Dad was a school principal, and I’d just go to school each morning - it was a very small school – and I’d hang out in the library and read”.
Jeannine read voraciously, though always from a curated list of books acceptable within her community, until she left her home and struck out into the big world, to college in Boston, where the world of books available for her to read exploded in magnitude.
She laughs recalling her arrival on campus in Boston: “It blew my mind”. She promptly retreated to the smallest and most family-like of the academies: the Department of German Literature where she earned what she ironically calls her “highly useful degree in German Literature.”
Sadly, it wasn’t a qualification that overflowed with career opportunities, and Jeannine moved back west to Portland Oregon, putting herself through career testing at a local community college. With understated humour she says: “the computer informed me that I’d be a good fit as an accountant or a chicken veterinarian. Although the call of chickens was strong, I decided to go back to school and get my CPA.” She’s been a full-time bookkeeper ever since. First in Portland before her husband’s employment transferred them to Dallas Texas, and later to Nevada where they now live.
The Dallas transfer was made tougher because neither Jeannine nor her husband knew anyone there. As anyone who’s tried to do this knows, building a community from scratch is a hard thing. It was stitching that offered Jeannine a community in Texas – one she found as soon as she sought out needlework shops in the Dallas area and was welcomed into the Tudor Rose Sampler Guild
In Dallas Jeannine first began designing cross stitch with the idea of one day getting to the Nashville Needlework Market. By the time she landed in Nevada, she was on fire and ready to start her own Flosstube channel and head to the Nashville Needlework Market to stand in awe at the towering atrium adorned with the banners of her people. The wonderfully overwhelming feeling that our founding trio Pam, Katie and Mia recall so fondly.
The more we talk, the clearer it becomes that it’s the community of stitching folk that Jeannine most values.
“Community is so important, and I really value the connection with other stitchers and designers. Fortunately, I had already started on Flosstube before the pandemic, or that would have been a pretty isolated time even by my standards. But I love that I can email back and forth with stitchers, and I’ve made some lovely friends that way.
As for inspiration – it’s a constant for me. I love to see what other people are stitching, and the way they’re changing it. I love to see what other designers are doing and hear about how they approach designing. And I feel so fortunate to be working in a time when we have so many resources for inspiration!”
We know Jeannine for her whimsical cross stitch designs featuring animals and plants. Like the wonderful Australian inspired Seasons of the Heart contribution to our Hearts for Pam project and her collaboration with CGT Hedgehog and Hyacinth.
Read on to see how you can get 20% off the charts and thread packs.
When we ask Jeannine to describe her design ethos – she confesses that it’s something she finds it difficult to articulate.
“The closest I have come is that my designs always make me smile. I’ve struggled with my mental health throughout my life, and so I try to pursue positive things, even if they’re small. I remember reading, years ago, that Jane Austen was asked to write a serious romance and responded that she simply couldn’t write anything if she couldn’t relax into laughing. And that really resonated with me because I have to find delight in a design, or it just doesn’t work for me”.
“I think mental well-being is just another aspect of community – it’s important to know that you’re not the only one struggling with this. We didn’t have language to talk about mental health when we were young… now, even to know about it is liberating. I get anxious, I struggle with depression. But the desperation of being young and not knowing whether your depression will pass has gone. With wisdom and experience, you learn that those moments do pass.”
When we delve into her Flosstube channel, we can’t help but comment on her striking curiosity about the natural world and how she incorporates this into her stitching life.
It turns out that her “World Around” segment is one of her favourite parts of the production. It’s where she makes time to talk about something she’s noticed in her environment – a bird or a flower or plant – and there’s a joy in listening to her. She thought of doing a short piece on nature when she was putting together her first Flosstube video.
“I was absolutely consumed by anxiety and desperate for ANYTHING to talk about. At the time my office was in the dining room and I had a lovely window where I got to watch quail every day. So I thought that would be a good start for a segment – just taking the time to learn about some of the things that I encounter and hadn’t necessarily paid attention to”.
The more we talk with this wonderful woman, the more we realise that she is a dedicated animal lover – of animals both wild and tame. As she puts it: “I’ve always loved animals ….. they’ve generally been more accessible to me than people are”.
Cats and dogs, in particular greyhounds, have a special place in her heart. If you’ve seen her Flosstube videos you’ll already know that she has two adopted greyhounds, Rye and Mosi who frequently feature. And you’ll know that she has dubbed 2023 her Year of Stitching Greyhounds: a project to stitch as many patterns incorporating greyhounds as she can find, in tribute to the death of her beloved hound Ninkasi during the Covid pandemic.
“I had such fun with the Hearts For Pam design because I did get to choose some unusual animals. That said, though, pretty much all the animals in Australia are unusual in one way or another. I know it’s a continent, but I think of Australia as a big island and islands always produce such interesting plants and creatures!
And we’re not surprised when she describes her design process this way – “it literally started with googling “animals in Australia” and learning more about them. You have so many climate variations there as well – you can have beautiful tropical plants, and amazing animals, and all the ocean life. I could probably do another whole design on sea creatures there, or just on your amazing birds – I’ve barely scratched the surface”.
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Jeannine says she loves stitching with CGT threads. “I particularly love the way the variegations completely change the result depending on how you use them. I’ve grown rather addicted to playing with patterns that you can create, depending on the way you do the stitch. If I’m working with a thread that has less color range I tend to stitch in straight lines, but if there is a bigger range then all bets are off. I think the biggest recommendation I would make to people is to think about the effect they want to get, and not be afraid to play around a bit to get it”.
Jeannine has described a new design of hers that: “includes the Rocky Mountains – which have bands of color in the rock because of the geology. So I used CGT stitched horizontally in that element to give the effect of those color lines. In that same design there are some animals where I used threads with a narrower color range to look more realistically like fur than a solid color would. They’re tiny elements but I love that you can put as much or as little thought into tweaking them as you’d like.
Jeannine’s approach is classically instinctive, shot through with the impetus to tweak and change, to vary the palette, to work with the materials that resonate with her personally. Her philosophy of stitching could be distilled to just this: “You spend so much time with each piece of stitchery – you just want to love every aspect of it”.
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