My Beginning

Whoo hoo! my first blog post!



      I want to share with you my adventure with cross stitch and other crafts. I hope you will see my passion, enthusiasm, and craving I have for cross stitch. I love cross stitch, but I enjoy doing other crafts as the suit the need for holidays and birthdays and so on. To me, cross stitch is more than a craft or hobby, it's an ART. 

As every adventure has a beginning, here is mine.

       My start into cross stitch is a little muddy, but I remember how it made me feel. I have always loved to color and create anything I could get my hands on. My mother has told many that "I was born with a crayon in my hand." I thinking I was 11 or 12yrs old. Maybe 1994. My mother was home for a couple of rare days off work to heal a wound on one of her legs. She needed to keep her feet pro[ed up, so that lead to little she could do. I found her later with a small cross stitch kit in her chair. I remember being so interesting on how she would create the image on the fabric. X by X with a strand of color, she added to the fabric. A image started to appear. How neat, I thought. All she was doing was following the instructions and a chart full of symbols and this image would just "show up" I'm thinking this is a foolproof craft. I can count out the squares of color. I can tie a knot. I want to try cross stitching!
  
     Someday later, not sure exactly when, I sneaked into my mother's drawer of crafty things. There were mostly random things and a few small cross stitch kits. I pulled out one that I like best and started it. To this day, I could tell you what it was or if I ever finish it. However, I fell in love with the process. I enjoyed separating the colors. I loved reading the chart. (Later, this would show for my love of maps in the future.) Once my mother found out what I had done, she wasn't he happiest of people. I can understand now. She didn't want me possibly ruining her new kits, by starting them or losing pieces to them.

       As my middle school and high school years went by, I always looked for kits I would be interested in doing. I was finding it so hard to find anything that fit my personality. As I shopped JoAnn's or Hobby Lobby, most of the kits seemed to be "flowers in a vase", "eagles and flags", "beaches and adirondack chairs", or "1990's folk country stuff". Perfectly fine for anyone else, but not a whole lot for a new generation of stitchers like me. Though, I found a few (very few) disney kits. They were very small and only had a character or two and some tiny motifs to create a frame around them, These were fun little kits to do. (until you find yourself stitching over 400 red crosses for Ariel's hair) I completed a few kits like this and gave away most of them as gifts. I hoped one day I would find something to stitch that had ME written all over it.