The Beauty of Cross-Stitch

The women in my family have always done some kind of fiber craft, whether knitting or cross-stitch or quilting or sewing. They weren’t always good at it; there is an infamous pink knitted dress with a defect across the middle that my grandmother made for my mom that attests to this. Grandma always shrugged it off and said, “That’s how you know it’s homemade.” But they always kept doing it. They weren’t always made to be pretty, but rather to be practical. They were pretty, because if you were going to put the time in, you might as well make it nice to look at. The quilts and blankets made by my foremothers were made to keep families warm in the harsh Illinois winters. The clothes were made because they didn’t have the money to buy store-bought clothes. My grandmother sewed both her daughters’ wedding dresses because there wasn’t money to buy a dress. I later wore my mother’s dress, both as a way to save money for my own wedding and as a way to honor my mother and grandmother and have my grandmother, who had died, at my wedding.

Embroidery and cross-stitch, I think, were later crafts, picked up because they were purely decorative, when my hardy pioneer relatives had more time to sit and make more “useless” items. I remember my mother cross-stitching a lot when I was a little girl, while we watched TV at my grandmother’s house, since we didn’t have one at our house until I was ten, and on long road trips. She had a car cross-stitch project that she’d work on while at my siblings’ sports practices and games, and sometimes in church. She made quilt tops for each of her children, five in total. She made stockings for all five of us, and each of her nine grandchildren. She even made six cross-stitched afghans for the grandchildren. She made dozens of pieces for the walls of our house, and then for the houses of my older two siblings, patterns that they picked, cowboys for my older sister, and a large Lord’s Prayer for my oldest brother. She found interesting ways to dye the fabric to get different finishes on it before fun dyed fabric was readily available online. I watched all this with interest, or disinterest, depending on what she was doing, but I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to get into this “old lady” craft. No one my age was doing it.

When I was a little girl, around 4 or 5, my mom tried to teach me to knit, since that’s what her mother did. I was frustrated and clumsy. My fingers couldn’t quite grasp the wooden needles properly or hold the yarn correctly. Getting it to move the way it was supposed to was beyond me, and in my irritation, I snapped the needles and proclaimed I was never going to knit again.

So, she tried to teach me to cross-stitch on stamped muslin. That was slightly more successful. I wasn’t as frustrated, but I didn’t love it. She gave up temporarily.

When I was around 12, she finally found a cross-stitch that worked. I made a small ornament of a cat sleeping on a present. I’ll admit, I had a fantasy of sending it to my celebrity crush and him seeing it and falling madly in love with me. Obviously, this didn’t happen. (I can’t imagine why.) But I did enjoy the actual cross-stitch itself. It was real cross-stitch, using Aida cloth and real thread and needle, following a pattern, using a hoop. I moved on to another, similar pattern.

I made bows that hang on doors. I have no idea what happened to those, but my parents proudly hung those up for years. I made several seasonal and holiday ones, so they could switch them out as needed. I made so many cat patterns. It was my cat phase, what can I say. I was a youngish teen, and I liked what I liked. I also went through an angel phase.

I kept looking for harder and harder patterns, and finally, my parents issued me a challenge, and showed me a pattern that even my mom hadn’t tried, a pattern in a magazine she’d subscribed to for years. It was called A Young Man’s Fancy. I didn’t think it looked too bad, so I gave it a shot. It really wasn’t that bad. Then the other shoe dropped. It was part of a pair, the other one a little girl called Sunday Best. So, I did that one, too. They are gorgeous. We renamed them Frederick and Rosemary. My parents were so impressed with my work, the first time I ever worked on linen, they paid to have them professionally framed, and they hang in a place of honor in my home.

Years later, my mom gave me another challenge, a nativity that was five separate panels, the center of which was approximately two feet tall, that goes in a special frame that is about five feet wide. It took me nearly eight years to complete because of the metallic thread, which I hate to work with. I added beads for sparkle and pizzazz. It looks amazing, but oh man, was it a beast to make.

After Frederick and Rosemary, I kept making big pieces on linen, preferring that to smaller kits and the kinds of things I was finding in craft stores. I haunted the specialty shops, my eyes suddenly open to the “other” side of cross-stitch. Before, I thought the only options I’d had were the kits I’d find in hobby stores, which weren’t really my thing, but now, I realized there were other kinds of patterns out there. I discovered things like Lavender and Lace, and Nora Corbett and Teresa Wentzler, and started doing those types of designs: large and difficult. They had lots of shading and little to no backstitching. I called them my “pretty ladies.” I became a snob about fabrics and threads, only using DMC thread and not wanting to use Aida cloth if I didn’t have to, preferring linen and softer evenweave fabrics like lugana and jobelan. I still hated working with metallic threads. I hated making lazy daisies. I could never make French knots, at first asking my mom to do all of them, but I eventually gave up and started using beads in their place. I figured out nearly every other fancy stitch on every pattern I picked up.

I made birth samplers for all my nieces and nephews. I made wedding samplers for lots of my friends. I designed a birth sampler for my best friend and a wedding sampler for my mom when she remarried years after my dad died.

Even when I was in my final semester of college and taking twenty-one hours, work was crazy, and I had four babies in just over six years, I never stopped cross-stitching. I lost my father suddenly and started writing like a madwoman to deal with my grief, writing nearly a million words of fiction in just over a year, I still cross-stitched, though, admittedly, not quite as much.

My father cross-stitched as well, though not as much as my mother and I. it was always interesting to see him with a needle and thread in his hand, unwinding after a long day at the hospital by creating something for someone else. He didn’t finish many pieces, and even designed one of his own. He left three pieces unfinished, and we still have them, not sure what to do with them. Do we finish them, or do we leave them as they are? He’s been gone for twelve years, but I’ve been the keeper of his unfinished things for the whole time. We took the one he designed and framed it, even though it was unfinished, and gifted it to my oldest brother. The others…we’re undecided. My mom and I are the only ones with time. She and I talked about it recently, and she may tackle one of the pieces, probably the last one. Then everything he did will be finished.

My aunt left a piece unfinished, too, when she died, and her daughter asked me to finish it. That is harder to do, in a way, because there’s no patter, so I have to make it up as I go. It’s been fun to figure out, and I’m pleased with what I’ve done. I’m hoping my cousin likes what I’ve done. The best part about cross-stitch, though, is that nothing is permanent. If you don’t like it, it’s easy enough to take it out and fix it. It can be permanent, or it can be impermanent.

The thread my aunt and father stitched years ago will stay forever in the pieces that have been framed and hung up. In the pieces that aren’t finished, the stitches feel more fragile. I touch them and it’s like touching them again, like holding their hand, like going back in time and sitting beside them to watch TV with them while we work on our craft.

In the spring of 2019, one of my best friends offered to teach me to knit again, after hearing the story of my mother teaching me to knit, and my fond memories of my grandmother always knitting us slippers and the afghans she made for all of us grandkids and how they were always my favorites. So, I made a lovely scarf with multiple design features (not flaws) and then later, two blankets for my grandnephews. I was all set to make a chevron blanket for my third grandnephew with her help when the pandemic hit, and we went into lockdown. I was in the middle of editing a book, so crafts were taking a backseat. I finished the book and then felt like, “Well, I’m home, let me try my current pretty lady I put down for knitting, since I don’t want to try a new knitting project alone.” I could. Not. Do it.

I worked on it for a week, and my brain just…cracked. The pandemic was hard for everyone, quarantine was difficult for so many people. We were locked in our homes, scared to see people, not knowing what was going on, not sure what was true and what wasn’t, because everything was changing so much. People were trying new things, so all the craft supplies were running out so quickly. I, luckily, had TONS on hand. So, I gave up on the pretty ladies, and picked up something small. A Satsuma Street pattern I’d had for a year that I’d never gotten around to because I wanted to finish my lady. It took me a week and I nearly cried with relief. Then I did another one. And another one. I saw something online that made me think of a friend of mine and did a deep dive and thought “Oh my goodness, I could make my friends feel better about everything going on by making cross-stitch for them.”

I know it’s weird, but it’s how I work. So, I spent hours cross-stitching for my friends. I made thirty-five pieces in the last six months of 2020. My depression skyrocketed during the pandemic, but only those closest to me noticed, because I was still somewhat functioning. My depression let me keep working on cross-stitch. It was my lifeline to the outside world.

At one point, the woman delivering our pizza one Friday night saw the large pieces in our living room and gushed over them. Most are mine. We became Facebook friends that night, and spent days sending pictures of our work and even some patterns back and forth to each other. She turned out to be a good friend to have, because I eventually ran out of my cross-stitching supplies, as many pieces as I was making. I put out a call on Facebook for fabric. Thread was easy and cheap enough, but fabric, good fabric, costs a lot, and I knew that there would be people out there who surely had some they’d bought for something, and they didn’t need or want it anymore. She was just that person.

She showed up at my house a few days later with an enormous piece of Aida (I could cover my queen sized bed with it) and some beautiful hand dyed linen she’d had for years and had no idea what to do with it. I’ve used a little of one of the pieces of linen and a lot of the Aida. She also linked me up to a seller in New Jersey who hand dyes fabrics and has sales every weekend. Because of a pizza delivery one weekend, my fabric stash has gone from fitting into a plastic grocery bag to needing three neatly labeled storage tubs, organized by fabric count. I have beautiful, hand dyed fabrics, and every time it’s time to start a new pattern, I get excited, because it’s time to paw through my treasure trove of fabrics, and I absolutely have her to thank for that. Whenever I use one of the linens she gave me, I definitely tag her in the picture, so she can see what I’ve done. I don’t think she knows how impactful that was in that moment. She also told me how all the manufacturing plants overseas had shut down, explaining the hike in prices. Before, a skein of thread had cost around thirty cents, and now they were up to sixty. We’re still hoping the prices will go back down, but since we’re both such snobs about thread, we’re gritting our teeth and paying double for DMC. I honestly don’t even know where to buy anything else, not that I would.

When I gave one friend her bag of goodies around Christmas (because everyone got some “just because” pieces, birthday if it was in the second half of the year, and Christmas, and she has a December birthday), she commented that I didn’t need to give her and her husband so many pieces. I said “Yes, I did.” Cross-stitching saved me, and I used it to show my friends how much I loved them, even though I couldn’t be with them in person for most of the year.

My group of friends is all still being cautious, because we have children who can’t be vaccinated and we have loved ones with health conditions and the numbers in our community are rising, so we do video messages to each other all the time, and I love seeing the pieces I made for them in the background. I love visiting their homes and seeing what I’ve made for them on the walls.

My best friend since childhood has multiple pieces I’ve made her, and some I honestly forget that I made for her and stop to look every time, which is ridiculous. When you’ve been cross-stitching for twenty-five years, though, it feels fair to not remember every single piece.

Making the pieces for my friends during the pandemic opened another door for me, beyond the craft stores. I found the fandom door, and that door is my favorite. I now have dozens of patterns for movies and books, patterns with subversive quotes and sayings, feminist patterns, patterns that are so unique for me and my taste and my friends’ tastes. It takes this old lady hobby and brings it into the modern era. I found designers that I love and follow and buy nearly everything they have and want to just cover my walls with it, swear words and all. I even got inspired to dabble a little more in the design world.

I haven’t done a LOT of design, and it’s not like I’m doing any groundbreaking design, either. I designed a Lesbian pride flag for my sister, which is bars of color, so I just had to figure out the right colors (so not really “design” so much as color matching) and I make a ton of little people patterns, so I sat down and worked out what my main characters in the book I wrote my look like in that style, and designed patterns of them. I’m currently stitching those, and I’m absolutely loving how they look. I can’t wait to finish it and hang them up on my wall. Baby steps for design, we’ll see how much further I’ll go with it. Maybe every book I write will inspire a cross-stitch pattern as well.

I still haven’t recovered from my depression and the pandemic enough to return to my pretty ladies. I’m still content to do my smaller fandom and feminist and subversive patterns. They stitch up quickly and they’re so “me” specific and they make me happy, even as they make the older generations of people in my family raise their eyebrows. Maybe that’s part of their appeal. I definitely have space for a lot more of them than for the pretty ladies, based on size alone. I’m not giving up on the pretty ladies forever, I still have about twenty of those all kitted up and ready to go one day. If I’m anything like my mother, I’ll be cross-stitching for the next forty years, when I truly am an old lady.

I hope that when I die, there won’t be a ton of unfinished pieces left for my kids to try to figure out what to do with, whether to finish them, or frame them as is, or to find someone to finish it for them, or to just hang on to it. I have one that my dad was supposed to help me finish, and for that reason alone, I haven’t decided if I will ever finish it. It would take me just a couple of hours to do it, but not having him around to help me hurts. I do hope that there are a few arguments over who gets which piece. There will be plenty to go around, so it’s unlikely, but I’d like to think there will be one or two that they’ll all want, and they’ll have to draw straws or something. I do hope that the sets stay together, but then again, I won’t be around to voice that opinion, and in the end, as long as the pieces are loved, that’s what really matters.

Cross-stitch is not just an old lady hobby. I think it’s an evolving craft, changing with the people who are doing it and evolving to what the younger generations want to make. We currently want to swear and stab things, frustrated at the world around us, so we’re stabbing fabric with needles and the needles are leaving behind our swear words, permanently, for all the world to see. We’re recreating our favorite books and movies in fabric and thread instead of celluloid and paper. We’re venerating memes as tapestries. We’re memorializing people in our own special way. We’re creating mobile murals. And it’s beautiful. It’s an art form, and it can be basic Xs or more elaborate fancy stitches. They can be tiny designs or massive pieces. You can frame them yourself or pay professionals. You can make it useful, by making it a quilt top, or make it purely decorative by hanging it on the wall. Make it your own thing. That’s the beauty of cross-stitch.