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rent a corner of the handcrafts tent. We were to set up our booth in only eight days. I needed to get to work.
    First, though, I had to buy some supplies.

5
    I PHONED EDNA AND ASKED IF I COULD JOIN her in Buttons and Bows for a little after-hours shopping. Of course she said yes. I grabbed my wallet, locked In Stitches, and ran across the street.
    Edna opened her door, setting off a jaunty tune that she claimed was “Buttons and Bows,” but supposedly was actually “Buttons and
Beaux
,” an old Vaudeville favorite that should have been called “
Un
buttons and Beaux,” and couldn’t be sung in polite company. Clay had renovated her store, too. Pot lights in the ceiling lit shelves of buttons to the left and a wall of trims to the right. They dazzled.
    Edna opened her hand to show me gleaming amethyst beads. “I’m trying to get these to stick in my hair and hide the shaggy ends, but they’re not staying.”
    “Edna,” I said gently, “that pixie look suits you.”
    “Pixie haircuts went out when I was a baby. Besides, this is more like a haystack. You tall women keep finding a way to point out my lack of stature.” It wasn’t a real complaint. She loved to tease and be teased.
    “Maybe you should let your hair rejuvenate before you mess around with it, or it will keep breaking.”
    “I suppose you’re right.” She brightened. “Maybe I’ll try glitter glue instead. You know what this village needs?”
    “I can think of a few things…” Another policeman or two. A paid fire department.
    “A hairdresser.”
    “Maybe one will come. But she probably won’t tell you to stick your hair together with glue.”
    “You’re no fun.”
    I told her I needed trims and cords that could be made to look like candle wicks, and she helped me find several widths of rayon- and polyester-covered cord, some puffy cording for insertion into wide piping, and a couple of different types of braid. She led me into her back room with its gadgets and packaged trims and offered me white rickrack. I bought that in several widths, too.
    “You have to see the projects Naomi and Opal have begun,” she said. First, she took me to Naomi’s shop, Batty About Quilts. Naomi’s front room was an art gallery. White walls showed off work that she and her students had done. This week, in addition to two king-sized quilts, she displayed potholders, placemats, tea cozies, and other kitchen linens, all of them quilted in fall colors, and all of them fabulous.
    Naomi was leaning over a large cutting mat in her back room. She wore a pretty sun dress she had pieced together using quilting methods and summery pastel cotton batiks, with no backing or actual quilting. All around her were bolts of quilting fabric in zillions of shades and prints, but the strips she was cutting out with her sharp roller were all in pure, bright colors, as if conjured from a rainbow. She was using more colors than the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple that often represented a rainbow, though. She’d stacked up bolts of several of the hues between each of those colors, so that the transition from red to purple was gradual.
    “Show Willow what you’re doing,” Edna demanded.
    With one of her generous smiles, Naomi handed me a sheet of graph paper. She’d used colored pencils matching the fabrics to map out a quilt on the paper. The rectangles of color would be placed in rainbow order, but they’d bedifferent heights, stepped up and down to create a sort of wavy rainbow effect.
    “Bargello,” I said. “I’ve seen it in needlepoint, but not in quilts.”
    Edna looked at me expectantly. “What’s another name for this type of stitching in needlepoint?”
    I clutched my purchases tightly as if she might take them away if I didn’t answer correctly. Finally, I had to admit that I didn’t know.
    “Flame stitch!” she crowed. She pointed at the bag in my hands. “You’re working on candlewicking, and Naomi’s working on a flame stitch