Today I took a lovely little field trip to the courthouse to play jury duty. Woohoo! Well, not woohoo, but I am not one of those people who cringes when I receive my summons. The first time I served on a trial I brought travel books and was attempting to plan a European vacation. The second time I was summoned (no jurors were selected that day), I was in grad school and spent my waiting time working on homework. This time, I wanted to embroider, but my summons listed needles and scissors as contraband items. Noooo!

While I am usually a 100% rule follower kind of girl, I cheated a bit at this. Sshh, don’t tell! So here are my tips/tricks to sneaking in mini embroidery sessions during all of that lag time experienced during the jury duty process. These tips would probably work well for flying as well; although TSA is fairly lenient when it comes to things like that. I have knitted several items while in flight. Okay, here are my tips:

1.) Cut (and re-wrap) your floss ahead of time. Seeing as you can’t bring scissors into the courthouse, use those scissors as much as possible before you leave home. 2.) Bring a seam ripper (put in coin section of wallet along with needle so that it doesn’t set the metal detector off). The seam ripper will act as your “scissors” once a piece of floss has been exhausted. Be careful not to puncture your fabric though! 3.) Bring a blank canvas or something with the sketched design only; it’ll keep you occupied for the entire day. 4.) Pack extra business cards. I passed out quite a few today when people asked to see what I was doing!

And more…

 5.) Bring a crafting related book to read for those super quick breaks where you don’t have a seat or when taking your project out would be too time consuming. 6.) Bring a sketch book in the event that inspiration strikes you (i.e., peoples’ tattoos). 8.) Wear your ware; if possible. Promote yourself, everyone will be oh so impressed!

This is the underbelly of my jury duty project. Don’t judge me, although a seam ripper works to cut your threads, it doesn’t cut them close enough. I’ll share proper photos once the design is complete and all  excess threads have been trimmed. Any guesses as to what it is?