Start from the Centre

Mrs. F was undoubtedly the worst teacher I ever had, but one of her lessons stuck with me: She taught me how to cross stitch.

I have no idea what prompted her to teach a class of ten year olds how to do embroidery, but I fell in love with it immediately. I made the World’s Ugliest Christmas Ornament™️. There are no extant pictures of it (and honestly, even if there were, I would not show them to you), but it was mine (well, I gave it to my mom for Christmas) and I’d made it myself. It was lumpy as hell, but I loved it. I’m not very good at drawing or painting, so it was a cool experience for me to take a piece of white fabric and some thread and create a picture with them that looked more-or-less the way it was supposed to!

I was kind of quietly ashamed of cross stitching for most of my childhood. My mom was always really disparaging of stereotypically 'feminine' activities, so it wasn’t something I told many people about, and after a few years and half-finished Christmas ornaments I stopped doing it for a while.

I created a cross stitch in high school for a math project. I don’t have a picture of that piece either, because my mom kept it (so much for those feminine activities!)

It totally felt like cheating—I get to do something I love, and I don't have to do 'real' math? Score!

I began at a few more projects after that, but then I started working and dating and it fell by the wayside.

I started again in my late teens, when I spent three months travelling for work. I was away from my girlfriend (now my wife) and I needed a project I could carry with me easily, something simple(ish) and familiar. Something homey. Without going into detail, it was a really hard time in my life, but cross stitch was just what I needed to centre and ground myself.

I find stitching very soothing. I struggle to do traditional meditation, but cross stitch definitely gets me in the same mindset—a series of repetitive motions that lets my brain just turn off.

With my wife’s help, I’ve done a few original designs.

During 2020 I got really into cross stitching. I was home a lot more, and I had a lot more time and energy to devote to something I’d just sort of been picking away at for the last few years (by which I mean doing an insane amount of stitching for a month or so, and then dropping it for a year).

I bought cases and bobbins and turned my giant, disorganized bags o’ floss into this:

And this Christmas my mother-in-law, who used to cross stitch and now quilts, gave me aida (cross-stitch fabric) and a shiny new pair of sewing scissors!

The most important pieces I finished in 2020 were a pair for my best friend. Her first son died as a newborn in 2019. Grief makes my words dry up. I don’t know what to say. What can you say in the face of that?

I wanted to show her how much I love her and the son I never got to meet. After flipping through the huge stack of cross-stitch magazines from the 90s that have found their way to me over the years, I found a very special pattern. It’s an Assisi-style embroidery, which is a technique where the stitches just outline the shapes, rather than filling them. It seemed especially appropriate—it was used for decoration on religious robes and altar cloths. I stitched my feelings into it—the grief I felt for her, the unimaginable pain I knew she was going through, and the love I want her to feel when she looks at it. I wove my sadness into something beautiful.

Her second son was born a year ago, and since I had a bunch of time on my hands I wanted to make him a cross stitch to celebrate his birth. Foxes are my favourite animal, so I picked a pattern with a fox in it—that way I’m always watching over him.

I stitched all my love and joy and hope for her and her son into this piece. I haven’t gotten to meet my ‘nephew’ yet, except over video chat, but he is the happiest little guy and he makes me smile every time I see a picture of him.

This is my current WIP:

I saw it on the cross-stitching subreddit and knew I had to make it! Again, it helped me channel my emotions into something physical. I’m taking all the confusion and fear and gallows humour that built up in me over the course of 2020 and I’m turning it into something cute and historical and a little morbid, because that’s right where I live.

I have at least four other projects lined up, with frames already waiting for them, and two more that I’ve started and not finished. Send help.