Project Dates: 12/25/2002 - 3/30/2025
This is my second cross stitch project. I had just finished an American Indian themed cross stitch. Dave bought me this as a holiday present, circa 2002. It was in the last few years of living in Elgin.
It was part of a morning coffee routine with my husband. We would sit and enjoy each other’s company, chat about our dreams, and spend about a half hour. Then my day would begin off to work somewhere in Chicago or the suburbs. I would have been working as a software development manager for either a grocery delivery service or as a consultant for a financial services firm.
The first sprint on working this project came to a screeching halt. I noticed in horror, to my then, still perfectionist-driven self, that I didn’t follow the pattern instructions to cross-stitch a particular section in half cross stitches. I was beside myself. There was about an area of two inches square. To take that much apart was daunting.
Life during that time frame was rather hectic. Taking care of two dogs, working away from home with hour long travel each way. We spent long hours renovating our house from Friday evening through Sunday evening. It was a fabulous mid-century modern with flat roofs, floor to ceiling windows in the living portion of the home, cedar ceilings. It was our first home after a very long decade period spent moving around almost every year.
It wasn’t a demonstrable decision. I just simply put that project aside, telling myself that I needed some space to decide what to do next; tear out or live with it and risk not having enough thread. That would happen anyway.
So, I slowly and conveniently forgot about it. Stuffed it into a box. Started something new for mornings, because I always had to have a fiber project going at all times!
So, that brings us to the present some two plus decades later. I am in the mode of finishing all started projects, slowly but definitively. I make a game of it. And out comes this one, only to my exhausted memory, not really remembering that I had already started it.
When I got is all settle3d and ready to go, getting it spread on the stretcher bars, and figuring out where to start, it stared me in the face. When I pulled it out, I remembered I had started it, but only when that error confronted me did I remember why it had sat in that box so long. Must have moved from box to box ten to twenty times.
I saw the instructions for the next stitch, looked at what was done, getting my bearing on where that stitch was going, and realized that I had done full cross stitches when it should have been half cross stitches. The same feelings of mortification came over me.
What to do? Well, I am two decades older, two decades more worn out from life, and having done a bit of work on myself, left it as is, and accept that it’s the error that will let out evil, as that mythology goes.
From then, it was smooth sailing. The project restarted on November 3, 2024, and I finished it on March 30, 2025.
Mom was an avid cross stitcher as well. She taught me to make sure the back is just as beautiful as the front. The “mark of a good craftsperson,” she would say.
I had to make two replacement purchases. Yes, in the same colorway as those double-up stitches. Interestingly, when I was looking for supplies, I found out that the company, Dimensions, sold all of its patterns to a sewing pattern company. After some online search, I found a contact who provided a replacement chart of the original colorways and their DMC alternative. So, I purchased that, delayed me a couple of weeks twice, but finished it anyway.
This project fascinated Samson. Here he is, meditating!
And here is Samson, envisioning his inner self!
The mistake is not noticeable, even to my eye.
The other win out of this was that the whole cross stitch was in a rather staid colorway. Whites, beiges, black. A tad of pastel color in greens, and some delicate browns and golds for the eyes. But a lot of white, black, and beige. Not an area of the rainbow I stray to by choice. But I could focus on the process, and loved completing something that I began almost twenty years prior.
It is now finished and framed. A gift from my husband, that is our animal totem!
Enjoy,
Alex
