As a child, I adored crafts of all kinds. One of my favorites, though, were those little needlepoint kits you would get with the plastic needle and thick yarn with the guide to tell you what colors should go where. In the end, you’d have a little stitched picture! I always found them so cute, and soon upgraded to ones using actual canvas and embroidery floss. And now…
Well, my room is littered with cross-stitch projects, both completed and half-finished. A couple of them are from kits, like this amazing one I found at a craft store, though I completed my own cross-stitch of Hooty from The Owl House after drafting the pattern myself. Now I have my very own house demon!
My most recent project is for my youngest sister’s Christmas present. She’s obsessed with Sleeping Beauty and Maleficent, so I purchased a pattern off of Etsy and the materials needed to complete it and, four months in … I’m nowhere close to done.
Cross-stitch is one of my favorite things to do as a sort of idle project, since I can watch Netflix, listen to music or a podcast at the same time, but it does take a lot of concentration, especially when counting how many stitches per color. This is definitely the largest project I’ve worked on—one and a half feet wide by two and a half feet tall—and has about twenty different colored flosses for it, which wouldn’t be a problem if they didn’t all look really similar. That, of course, is because of the shading of the picture, but I digress.
The picture itself is coming along quite nicely, if I do say so myself, but sometimes I wonder how much of my creativity is there when I complete each pre-made project. After all, I didn’t make the pattern, and I didn’t switch out any colors or add anything to the final product. All I did was follow instructions, right?
No! Of course not! I’m sure I’m not the only one to have felt this way, but in making things like this, you put yourself and your time and effort into it, which makes it unique to you! You’ll have memories attached to creating the final product and you’ll be able to hang it up with pride for years to come. So if you’re feeling like you need to be a little more creative with your projects, don’t! You’re already bringing something into existence with your own hands; what more could you ask for?