Fans of Roz Chast – cartoonist and author of numerous books, including 2014’s acclaimed memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? – may have been surprised when her piece Motherboard appeared on the cover of the New Yorker this week. It was not an unusual setting for Chast’s work, as she has been associated with the magazine since 1978, but it was another sort of departure. For Motherboard, Chast set aside her usual pen and ink to work with muslin and thread, creating a tapestry instead of a cartoon.

“I learned it in sixth grade, in Brooklyn,” Chast says of her introduction to embroidery. “I had a really good teacher. . .she taught the entire class, including the boys. We embroidered a map of the United States; I remember we had to do corn cobs for states where corn was the main crop.”

Chast used the skill to modify her blue jeans in high school but mostly let it lapse in the years since. She returned to it “less than a year ago,” inspired by the work of Susan Boardman, whose work embroidering passages from Moby Dick Chast encountered at the Nantucket Historical Association. “When I saw her stuff,” Chast says, “it was just, ‘Oh, I want to do this. This is amazing.’ ”

Her initial effort was a stylized alphabet, and as she went along – stitching a jumble of neighing horses, a couch-potato parrot, and a trio of self-conscious robots, all with her trademark warbly lines and busy backdrops – she found that some old lessons had stuck, and some needed refreshing. “It’s funny how muscle memory comes back,” Chast says. “I remembered very much how to do the chain stitch…but for the French knots I went online and looked at a tutorial.” She recommends the video crash courses, with trepidation: “Some of them are crappy, but some of them are actually pretty good!”

Chast plans to continue working with craft. She currently does rug-hooking while she watches the news in the evenings – “to try not to jump out the window,” she says – and though no specific embroidery pieces are planned, her renewed fascination with the form is intact. Her upcoming book, a New York love letter called Going into Town to be released in early October, will consist of her drawn work, but when an idea strikes that a cartoon can’t capture, Chast plans to reach again for the needle and thread.