Actress Debra Jo Rupp has joined the elite pantheon of TV moms: her Kitty Forman on That '70s Show can bake and solve problems with the best of them! (In fact, devotees of the show know that when Kitty is stressed, she cooks -- and cooks -- and cooks!) In person the petite actress has a surefire, nonfattening stress reliever that she carries with her everywhere: needlepoint. Rupp was first introduced to needlepoint by her best friend when she was trying to stop smoking, a process she describes this way: "...Basically you have two choices: you can either eat and gain 200 pounds, or you can kill yourself." Needlepoint, she explains, is somewhere in the middle. Every Saturday morning Rupp rushes to her favorite needlepoint store, A Stitch in Time, to attend class -- and, more important, to spend time with her classmates, a group of needlepoint enthusiasts who enjoy the socializing about as much as they enjoy the stitching. Rupp and her needlepoint guru, Marcia Gould, explain a very basic -- and valuable -- technique to help avoid having unsightly knots on the back of the canvas: Tie a knot in the end of the yarn, but insert the needle from the outside of the canvas near where you plan to begin stitching; pull the knot until it rests firmly against the surface. - Several threads away from the knot, bring the needle up from underneath the canvas and begin stitching (figure A), burying the tail of yarn as you continue down the row.
- When you reached the knot, carefully cut it away with scissors. The yarn is secured under the first row of stitches -- with no knot to distort your work.
One of Rupp's favorite stitches is the Byzantine stitch, shown on the chart on the right side of figure B; the left side of the image shows how the chart relates to a piece of needlepoint canvas. Each square on a needlepoint chart represents one space on the canvas. The needle is inserted in a space and brought diagonally across another space (or a number of spaces, according to the chart) to create a stitch. A finished row of Byzantine stitch is shown in figure C.
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