Of my many hobbies, one of the few that actually places me in more
common circles is cross-stitching. I picked it up on a whim around 2005 or so
when my husband and I took to listening to Coast to Coast AM in the evenings
(we're Streamlink members). I bought the Eeyore pattern you see below and
took off rather quickly on it. Then I set it down for 7 years. I
mean, I was so close to finished, and
I just set it down. It became one of those monkey-on-your-back projects
that seems to grow heavier with every day you ignore it. So, 7 years later,
which would bring us to the fall of 2012, I pulled old Eeyore out and tried to
send him home with a friend to finish, telling her she could do whatever with
it afterward, but just knowing it was completed would give me peace of mind.
After she'd left and I realized she'd
forgotten to take Eeyore with her, I suddenly found it within myself to
continue working on it, very much like the whim that had caused me to purchase
it 7 years earlier. I was pleasantly surprised to find that locating the row
where I’d left off on the now yellowing chart wasn’t impossible after 7 years. As I stitched, my feelings moved from obligation
to actual enjoyment. It was the moment I
sewed the X-es for his eyes and thought “now he can see!” that I knew I was hooked.
After roughly two weeks of wrestling the
demon of backstitching, during which I had to undo and redo the same section
multiple times to achieve the 3D effect (I’ve attached Eeyore pre-backstitch so
you can see the difference) I had him made into a pillow for my mom’s Christmas
present.
Following Eeyore, I worked the seahorse
cross stitch for my friend’s mom. The pattern I chose was shipped from New
Zealand and was my first lesson in the varying styles of needlework directions
over the world: the chart told me which symbols correlated to which colors, but
the problem was that that colors were all so similar. I had such a rough time
distinguishing “purple” from “medium purple and “purplish blue” that I
concluded that company should have had the threads pre-labeled. I finally sorted
it out and found it a fairly simple project – until the end where I abandoned
my newly-learned “nun stitch,” which was causing the material to prematurely fray,
for a simple backstitch. And just as I was proudly putting the
finishing touches on the seahorse, my friend – whose mom was to be the
recipient – asked hopefully, “Are you going to put her name on it?”
They say all you have to do is chart the name in the squares, but
I can tell you after stitching words (not pre-printed) on two projects now it
is not that simple. I had to restart her name several times to
adjust for even spacing, etc.
After she learned I was stitching a bookmark for a friend’s mom,
my own mom suggested I do my next one for her. I thought long and hard before
settling on the Scottish Piper pattern that hails to a joke we’ve long had
since our trip to Scotland. The pattern was, in fact, shipped from Scotland,
and ironically, I found myself back
in Scotland while finishing it. I was in a pub, in fact, and never more glad to
say goodbye to a project in my life. The New Zealand company’s instructional
deficiency had nothing over that of the Scottish. While the chart told me where
to put the backstitching and outlining, only the picture (small as the
life-sized bookmark) told me what colors to use. If you will observe the detail
in my Scottish Piper, you might get an inkling of the tedium this involved. It was exhausting, especially as I had to move
back and forth between studying the chart and studying the picture.
Furthermore, the chart and the picture had some differences in spacing that
forced me to improvise. On more than one occasion, I thought I was almost
finished only to find I had missed or erred on a section.
I finished it in an Edinburgh pub, trying to beat the setting sun
in the window behind. A couple sat next to me, watching with interest. I
explained with embarrassment that I hadn’t originally intended to cross-stich a
Scottish Piper in Scotland, as if I
were an obsessive tourist. (I was relieved to learn they were Irish.)
The finished product, as you see, is framed for my mom. (It’s
going to be a surprise, but I’m posting it now because I don’t think she ever
visits my blog.) The puckering you might notice along the border is how I
learned the hard way not to stitch so tight, but I wasn’t about to redo it all
again. Plus, what mom is going to care
about that?
I’m currently working on the dragon that is going to be all for
me, framed to hang in my study.
So, with apologies to my students for stealing their conclusion
style, that is the story of how I began cross-stitching - if you don't count
the large-print kitten I stitched as a child and the goose I never finished
when I was 14.
