Chair Necessaire in 4 Parts

Stitching is more enjoyable when you have good tools that are close at hand. Have you lost your scissors in the chair or borrowed your child’s ruler when you needed to measure? Luckily, a solution is at hand with Kathrin Ellison’s chatelaine that includes a scissor fob, needle case and “biscornu” pin cushion. The best part is you get to have fun stitching it!
“It’s actually more of a ‘chair necessaire’, a type of chatelaine that hangs over the arm of the chair,” explains Kathrin. “We need to keep our necessary tools safe and handy.” The project has pockets for rulers and other needed tools and, if you can keep family members from “borrowing” your tools, these should be at your finger tips.
Kathrin has been stitching since she was 11 and she admits that, because of her early training, nothing scares her when it comes to stitching whether needlepoint or petit point or designing. “In the 1970s, I even did a lot of crewel,” she laughs.
When she couldn’t find many petit point designs on the market, Kathrin began designing her own. Her mother, Gitta, opened a shop, Gitta’s Petit Point, where Kathrin helped on evenings and weekends, selling petit point and needlepoint. Eventually, the shop began to carry cross stitch and canvas work.
What excites this Mississauga designer the most about stitching today is the range of colour and the choices in thread. “Monochromatic designs are popular in France right now and I love the look when a variegated thread is used,” she says.
Read more in our Spring 2009 issue.

Article by Kathrin Ellison
Gitta’s Petit Point
271 Lakeshore Road East
Mississauga, Ontario
www.gittas.com