Friday, August 17, 2007

C is for Cross-stitch


I can't remember when I made my first cross-stitched picture. It's something I seem to have been doing for ever. Come to think of it, I have no idea how it ever entered my mind that this was something I would try either. My mother used to make tapestries where the picture was painted on the canvas and my grandmother embroidered fancy stitches on tablecloths, but I can't remember ever seeing any of them doing counted cross-stitch. I'm a more thorough and fastidious type, however, so the more "scientific" approach of following a pattern of blocks and converting it into a picture that would end up just the way you had planned, appealed to me, I suppose. The bigger the picture and the greater the challenge, the better!
This one titled "London 1616" is quite large, about 15 x 20" and stitched on evenweave. I started this when I was about 14 and it took me a few years, but I did finish it!

I have come to appreciate the quick fix of stitching a smaller image however, and once I realized that they didn't all have to be pretty teddies and fancy flowers, but that you could actually add some humour, there was nothing stopping me!


I love these "Listen Honey... " designs and have several of the charts. In fact I have oodles of charts of all sorts that I'll probably never get around to stitching, and that is just as well, I suppose, because where would I hang the ****things?

I always have something on the go, and right now I'm in a "Witchy" state of mind I think, working on this design. The one above is one I did a year or so ago, from Lizzie*Kate .

I once read an interview with a cross-stitch designer whose five year old daughter told everybody that her mother "made pictures from little kisses". There must be something to be said for that ;-)


I've just realized that I ought to take new photos of these old things, they are way too blurry. Sorry about that!

1 comment :

Nettie said...

love your kitty cross stitch!

what's your native language?