As a writer, I tend to be drawn towards text in my embroidery work. The idea for this piece was born while working on a larger project depicting cruel things my parents had said to me as a child. While I stitched, the word, No, repeated over and over in my head. There is a rebellion in this simple, yet powerful word and it made sense to backtrack and begin again with it as the focus, especially given the purgative, meditation in motion experience that I have with the painfully slow act of hand-stitching. I have read that in some cultures embroidery was regarded as spell casting, and I much prefer this way of looking at it to the dainty, white-gloved perfectionism to which we are most familiar.