Stitches with African/Portuguese Soul

Olá! This week I have a totally different story for you...
Sometime ago I created "agulha não pica club". Usually club meetings are workshops where I teach how to embroider... But the club can meet wherever there is a XL agulha não pica kit - kits created thinking of groups... In August 2011, the club met in a very distant and special place to the delight of many kids and even adults.

Last Summer a friend of mine was going to Africa - S. Tomé and Príncipe - for a month with her family to take care of the children of the Isle of Príncipe while their parents were working in local farms - roças. August is a hard working month in Island of Princípe and children need being cared during the day. São Tomé and Príncipe is a Portuguese speaking island country, an independent nation since 1975. One of the smallest and I believe most beautiful countries in the world.

My friend and the rest of the group had everything arranged in order to have lots of material to play with the children, it was all shipped two months before... Next to the time they were leaving I offered her a XL agulha não pica "lacing cards" kit. It was suited for 20 kids... She said it was enough once they would be offering so many different activities... But in Africa nothing happens as planned... The material only arrived a week before their return to Portugal and I believe we can say the "miracle of multiplication" happened once again.


They counted about 150 different kids and even adults embroidering on cardboard during those weeks. The cards I had sent were gone the first day and the wool soon, too. But with hard work and imagination they managed to find more cards and wool, despite being in a tropical country where wool is not a number one need...



The club became a great event and my friend was even interviewed for the local radio. Every day there were queues and children waited in an orderly way for their time to begin. The space was not enough, they had to share only 10 cork pads and the bamboo sticks surprisingly withstood all that effort. But everything worked so well... And the results were incredible!



When my friend arrived home she surprised me with all these incredible photos. It was one of the happier moments in agulha não pica's history... One of those moments we keep in our heart hoping it will be inspiring for a lifetime...

And I believe these smiles are a lifetime of inspiration for everyone!! That's why I'm sharing them with
you... In Portuguese we say "sorriso" for smile and "criança" for child...



These beautiful stitches have an African/Portuguese soul. They made me realize how embroidery is really universal... And how happy we can be just having a needle in our hands... wherever we are... And of course as said by a great Portuguese poet "the best in this world are the children"... "o melhor do mundo são as crianças"...