Project Mulberry Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, and turned back to the screen.
    He didn't get it.
    "How did you do that?" I asked my mom. Never mind about Patrick for now. I'd explain it to him later.
    "I can teach you," she said, "but not right away. You have to get good at the basic stitches first."
    "It's like sewing, right?"
    "Yes and no. It
is
like sewing, but there are also some differences, and you have to be a lot more precise, which makes it harder. Let's see how you do."
    She was right. To start with, I had to put two pieces of thread through the eye of the needle instead of just one. It took me five tries! I thought it would only be
twice
as hard as putting one piece through, but it was exponents again—about 2 3 times harder.
    After I finally got the needle threaded, my mom taught me the simplest stitch. Running stitch. You put the needle in and out and in and out of the fabric, and you end up with what looks like a dotted line. Easy.
    My mom looked at my stitches. "Not bad," she said. "But a little uneven. In embroidery it's important that all your stitches be exactly the same size." Then she did five stitches to show me what she meant.
    They were beautiful. Perfect. So even.
    "Not just the stitches," she said. "The spaces in between have to be the same size, too. Because—"
    "Because that's what makes the back side look the same as the front!" I exclaimed.
    My mom nodded and smiled.
    I was proud of myself for figuring that out.
    Then I got so involved in trying to make perfect running stitches that I almost forgot Patrick was still there.
    "Jules," he said, turning the swivel chair around so he could look at me. "We've got a problem."
    Â 
    "Good news first," Patrick said. "There are a whole bunch of places that sell the eggs. We can order them over the Internet. They're around ten bucks for twenty-five eggs."
    Hmm—so it
was
possible to get silkworm eggs here. Then what was the problem?
    "But it's no good us even ordering them," Patrick went on, "unless we can find a mulberry tree."
    My mom made a little surprised noise. "That's right," she said. "I'd forgotten about that. We had a mulberry tree in our backyard in Korea. It was one of my jobs to pick leaves for the worms to eat."
    "There's something called artificial silkworm food," Patrick said. "But it's really expensive, because you have to buy a huge amount. For, like, hundreds of caterpillars. And besides, they grow much better if they eat mulberry leaves. They won't eat any other kind."
    A mulberry tree? Wasn't it a bush? That nursery rhyme,
Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush...
    Patrick said what I was thinking. "I've never even heard of a mulberry tree. A mulberry
bush,
in that song for babies. But not a tree. I bet there isn't a single mulberry tree in all of Plainfield."
    My mom turned to my dad. "
Yobo
," she said.
    That's not his name—his name is Jay. Jae-woo in Korean, but people call him Jay. My mom's Korean name is Jung-sook, but everyone calls her June.
Yobo
is a Korean word that means "honey" or "dear." My mom and dad almost always called each other "
Yobo.
"
    Yobo,
don't you know someone with a mulberry tree?" my mom asked.
    My dad lowered the newspaper. "What's that?" he said.
    "Mulberries," my mom said. "Didn't someone bring a mulberry pie to one of your office parties a while ago? Remember, you told me about it because you said you hadn't seen mulberries since Korea."
    "Oh. Yes." My dad blinked a couple of times. Obviously, he hadn't been listening to the conversation, so now he was clueless. "I did tell you about that, didn't I."
    "Dad!" I said. "Those mulberries—do you know where they came from?"
    Patrick and I both waited for my dad's answer, but I knew it was for different reasons: Patrick hoping the mulberry tree was somewhere nearby, me hoping it wasn't.
    "Wisconsin," my dad said.
    Yesss.
Wisconsin was hours away!
    "The lady who made the pie, her mother lives in Wisconsin," my dad continued. "The lady went up there