My journey with cross stitch started like most things, very simply. It has grown to be a form of artistic expression.

After some brunches with friends, discussing our various crafty passions and their encouragement, I’m sharing that journey here.

I’ve been cross stitching since I was very young. Starting with simple kits, I had a pile of little completed cross stitches. I’ve given some away but over time developed a pile of them. Too small to do anything useful with.

I hadn’t thought much about what I enjoyed by spending hours doing little x’s on cloth in various colours. It was something I did when the rest of my family read. I worked in a craft store in high school and my mum joked about how I must be a favourite employee because I would spend most of my pay in the store.

Interest waned as I didn’t know what to do with them.

An inherited pile of threaded cotton was wound onto cards and filled a box.

I started to cross stitch from patterns in books, picking colours from the box. It was a good challenge to work out what colours to use as I hadn’t bought the ones specified for the pattern.

After a break I thought, what am I going to do with these?

The decision was to make them into a quilt, but I had no where near the number of completed cross stitches yet.

This is when the real journey began. It had moved from doing kits to creating a work of art, both individually and when possible, in combination. I now could work freely not wondering what to do with them. I could just enjoy it. Mistakes were not because I’d deviated from a pattern; it was when I looked at a completed work and thought I could have done a part of it differently.

This started by looking through old patterns and then altering them.

First by playing with colours…

Then by playing with designs…

Then I started studies, developing the design while I worked. They started as a piece of Aida cloth and no plan. After each session it grew more and more to a finished work. Similar to having a blank canvas and a paintbrush and set of paint – There is the materials and an idea for an artwork that forms over time. I’m looking forward to sharing the ideas behind them and hearing about your cross stitch stories.