Stitch in time: Kopperston woman wins Best of Show at fair

Children are always urged to listen to Mom's advice. But occasionally, that works in reverse.

Tammy Stafford of Kopperston loves to cross stitch and particularly liked a pattern of "Rainbow Road," a street of pastel-colored buildings in Charleston, SC.

Still, she had no plans to do anything special with it - until her son, Joshua, a Concord student, stepped in.

"He said, 'Mom, you have got to enter that in the State Fair,'" Stafford recalled. "He said, 'I think that's a winner.'

He was right. Stafford won Best of Show in cross stitch as well as a blue ribbon for a sampler.

(Photo by John Conley)

"When I called my son and told him (I won), he said 'I knew it," she said.

"I was thrilled when I found out I won," recalled Stafford, an employee at Oceana Pharmacy. "I couldn't believe it."

The cross stitch winner, a large pattern with lots of detail work, "took hours and hours" of work, she noted. "It was worth all of the time I put into it."

The sampler, she said, took a much shorter time.

She has been doing cross stitch for 27 years. "I started out doing little things and then built up to doing bigger pictures," she remarked.

It's a prime form of relaxation for her. "I have a little place where I work on my cross stitch and watch television," she explained.

She hopes to pass along her skill to a five-year old niece.

"Not a lot of people do this," she observed.

She gives most of her work away, but not "Rainbow Road."

"I'm going to keep this one," Stafford said. "This one is going on my wall."