A New Cross Stitch Blogger Is Born

After looking with longing and envy at all the wonderful cross stitch blogs out there, I've timidly decided to add one to the community. But it will be a bit different than most that I see. Unlike the bloggers whose work and talent I covet, I'm not very good at this! My stitching is uneven - although I've adopted the railroading technique my stitches don't all look similar, I only manage to do a few rows at a time, I take two steps forward and then three steps back and have to frog, and I'm SLOW! I can't imagine participating in exchanges or sending gifts for birthdays, though it looks like such fun. It's as if there is a big secret to this that everyone but me knows - how to juggle family, job, and community responsibilities and still manage to have a prodigious output of beautiful cross stitch pieces. Though I know that practice will, if not make perfect, at least improve my performance somewhat, I have few illusions that lead me to believe I will ever attain the prowess so many of the blogging stitchers display.

So why do I want to start a blog? To chronicle the journey of someone like me, new to it and trying to master a craft that I love. I'll probably always stitch like a novice. But I'm hoping that, if I stick with this, it will encourage me to keep trying, and perhaps when I look back over my entries I will actually see some progress.

I did do some stitching many years ago, when the only patterns I had came from magazines or kits, and Aida cloth was the only fabric to use. When I decided to try stitching again twenty-some years on, I turned to the Internet and quickly found out about these blogs. There were so many pictures of wonderful projects - I started tracking them down and soon had a stash of my own. Then I learned about stitching on linen, something I thought I could never manage. The lovely owner of Hoops and Needles encouraged me to try, so I did. And I probably will never stitch on Aida again. Here is my first effort:



It was so much easier than I had thought, even though I did make a counting mistake (there are three threads between letters r and d rather than two). I didn't realize it till after the piece was done, and I didn't frog it - after all, there's a philosophy in the creative world that says to put a mistake in every piece, because nothing is perfect except God. I didn't do it on purpose, but it's a nice idea to fall back on!

Well, that's it for my first post. I have a few more finish pictures to use, but they are few and far between, so I'll draw out the suspense. This is kind of fun!