Meredith's 2024 Attempts (mabith)

Hello all, after a long absence. Much like the last year I was on LT (2020), I've still been struggling with crafting of all sorts. I miss it desperately, I need it, but it remains so emotionally wrapped up in my parents, both of whom have passed away now.

Making very niche cross-stitch projects for people has now come with the downside of being faced with a lot of things I'd made my dad when he died in 2023. Such a mix of memories, but also pieces I don't necessarily want to hold onto but are so personal to him no one else would want them either. Yet to orphan them to a thrift store also feels wrong.

I haven't taken a picture yet, but I did get another book done on my cross-stitch project of children's classics book spines last year. I stalled again when I got to another large stretch of single-color stitching (my least favorite). Whatever I do or don't get done craft-wise though, I'm happy to be back on LT and getting a peep at all your projects.

I have to prepare things to move this year, so I've been going through craft supplies ruthlessly and finding things I'd forgotten about. Among them, a set of novelty wooden cross-stitch plaques and photo frames and such, bought god knows how many years ago now. They're very annoying to stitch on, but here we are. I made this for a friend:



I used the border pattern that came with it, knowing I would never start if I tried to do one from scratch. Then I made the cat up myself.

Similarly I did this as a ornament for my Christmas tree. Hadn't had a tree for ages, saw a small kitschy fake tree that would have made my parents laugh and bought it. Most of my ornaments are family ones, very delicate vintage glass things and not quite enough to cover the tree. So I'll stitch a few things to add on.



I think it was actually supposed to be a necklace, but it's rather large for that! I have two other round ornament pieces I'll do as well. It's a nice break in rests between going through all the craft supplies and such.

It's nice to see you back, Meredith. And my deepest sympathies to you. I can understand that emotional pull of not wanting to let go of projects that remind us of our parents. I have a crocheted bedspread that my mother made that was large squares with three-dimensional roses in the center of each block. It's not my style (at all), it has a large coffee (I assume) stain in one section, and yet I cannot get rid of it. Even though she's been gone for 20 years. I keep saying I need to at least try to get the stain out. We moved 7 years ago and I still held on to it.

>3 mabith: - I love this little ornament. When we moved 7 years ago, I had to ruthlessly go through craft item and some of the decisions were hard. I should probably look at those things I brought and haven't touched in 7 years and get rid of some more.

Welcome back, Meredith. I'm so sorry for your loss. Like Betty, I have experienced that emotional pull. My mom was a quilter and left behind many, many beautiful pieces. I kept a couple of them for myself, even though my relationship with her was quite fraught and we were pretty much estranged until her final few years. They are stored away in a box and I rarely look at them, but still can't imagine letting them go.

I hope you're able to get back into crafting this year, at least a little bit.

Welcome back, Meredith! We're so happy to have you here in whatever capacity you're able.

Hi Meredith. So sorry you've had to go through losing both your parents. Even though it's really tough still, I hope that one day crafting will be easier for you again.

Your ornaments are adorable!

I am sorry to hear of your loss. I have pillow cases my mother embroidered and because of her, I do embrodery also. Take care.

I know some cross stitchers have taken some designs they've done or found in thrift stores and made them into project bags. That may be an idea of a way you can make those things you stitched for your dad useful to you. The ones I've seen are the zippered kind with fabric backings and lining, but I know some people also do a more traditional tote. You may be able to get some inspiration from the comments on Deborah Harry's ETSY shop that show the purchased item although she doesn't currently have any bags posted for sale. (The shop name is DeborahHarrys.) I think she also has a Facebook page.

Adding my sympathies on your losses, Meredith.

Your recent small finishes are lovely. Also, do I spy a tortie cat in >3 mabith:?

Welcome back, Meredith... I'm so sorry about your parents. May their memories be a blessing and comfort to you. I also hope you'll have the time and energy to get back to your crafting... I find it feeds my soul and calms my heart.

One of the things that frustrates me about grief impacting my crafting is that my main work (cross-stitch and knitting) aren't something my parents did or taught me (or even that I learned in childhood), so the difficulty caught me off guard. They were always so happy when we were doing anything creative and really invested and genuinely curious about my projects and designs (I largely design all my cross-stitch pieces myself). We all have people who think what we do is neat, but that true, strong investment is more unique. It just always seemed so cruel that the hobby that saved my life in a lot of ways was suddenly made so difficult.

>4 dudes22: It really is so difficult with those kind of heirlooms. It feels too hard to part with it but sometimes also difficult to know it's just in a box... I am waffling on the craft supplies about shoving them at my sister and her kids but I have a feeling she would say yes and then want to essentially store them with me permanently.

>5 lauralkeet: I wonder if these items help tether us a bit, to the actual person, the actual relationship vs how society tells us we're supposed to feel at specific deaths. My relationship with my dad was complicated (he was not emotionally mature enough to build real relationships with his adult children), and sometimes I think without the physical items it would be easy to slide into a false sense of him and our history.

>6 scaifea: >7 PawsforThought: >8 mnleona: Thank you so much

>9 thornton37814: That's an interesting idea! I hadn't thought about that. One does always need more project bags.

>11 PlatinumWarlock: That's exactly it, feeds the soul and calms the heart. I wouldn't have gotten through so many years early in my illness without knitting and then especially cross-stitch. A structure to the days, small achievable goals, an almost meditative practice, and a sense of productivity - all so valuable!

>10 MickyFine: Ha, yes, this is my sweet Ixnay. She's mostly blind, extremely opinionated, and tries to live on my lap.



My beloved elderly cat died in 2020, and I got Ixnay in 2021. She's been an absolute godsend. I waited a long time for the 'right' cat to appear, and felt strongly she was the one. My first cat as a child was a tortoiseshell, so it felt a bit like coming full circle.

>13 mabith: Oh, my! She's gorgerous!

My sympathies on your losses. Grief is a weird bugaboo.

>13 mabith: Ixnay looks an absolute sweetheart.

That is a very beautiful cat! I love torties.

Who doesn't love a beautiful tortoiseshell cat? Barney (one of my three) says hello to Ixnay!

>14 PawsforThought: >16 MickyFine: >17 lauralkeet: >18 thornton37814: She is certainly a beauty, if a bit of a demon (by which I mostly mean she's just a stereotypical cat). She's not used to the stitching yet, and turned around several times today to pounce on my hand, but it's better than last year when I dropped a 10"x10" q-snap on her at least once a day...

>15 lesmel: It certainly is! Really gives you every emotion under the sun all mixed up together.

I stitched another little ornament, which is supposed to be an embroidery floss bobbin, and have many regrets about not just using black for the backstitching. However, trying to unpick ANYTHING from these wooden forms is a nightmare. I regret not using a darker color in the background as well. I colored the backstitching around the white parts with pen and called it Good Enough. If I bugged with it in 10 months when I'm putting up a Christmas tree I can always scrap it then. I'm going to put an old needle diagonally across the 'thread' section, which will add to it, I think.

I'm determined to use up the bits in these novelty kits, at least to get me back to stitching every day. I've completely lost my stitching callous but hope it will come back quickly.

Another rainbow, because I couldn't think of anything else to do and didn't like the patterns the kit come with. Now I have no idea what picture to put in the frame! I feel like it needs a silly picture.



I have another larger frame in this set, two tiny tiny hoops, and greeting card. I probably won't do the greeting card, that seems like a nightmare and then will the recipient keep it? Will it get messed up in the mail?

Today I also spent a full hour weaving in ends on two dozen hats I knit years ago. My sister will hopefully come up on Saturday and I'll see if she wants any of them (she has three kids and I haven't made any of them hats in a long time). After that I'll try to shove them off on people in my book club. Wish I'd done it in time for our February meeting, hopefully it's still cold in March!

>22 mabith: Two dozen hats?! Wow. If you run out of friends to give them to, you might find a local charity that will take them. There's one in my town that serves "precariously housed" teens and young adults, and others who provide clothing to those in need. Sometimes they only accept knitted items made with acrylic yarns, not wool (due to allergies) but it might be worth a check.

Oh yeah, I'll definitely be looking into donating whatever is left.

Hats are my comfort knit (they're mostly quite simple ones, though there are a few nice cable knits), especially if there's a soccer tournament since I can largely knit them without looking at the piece and do prefer to keep the hands busy.

My friend knits and crochets hats for Knots of Love, although they are rather particular about what yarns you can use, I think.

I love the rainbow frame!!

>26 scaifea: Thanks!

The hat problem was solved. My sister was up to hang out during my niece's girl scout activity, and she wanted a lot. Her church has some sort of program she thought would want whatever she didn't take, so she just took the whole bag. I don't have to think about it anymore and that's the main thing!

I'm not going to start back on this project until I'm done with the next little one at least, but when I do get back to serious stitching this is what I'll continue working on:


The in-progess book is Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and there will be one more book on the left side (Little Women). The pattern is my design (but all based on actual editions), and I am idiot, because I absolutely hate stitching large, single-color fills and yet I thought I should make this.

I still find The Secret Garden spine so frustrating. I wanted to have gold for the floral backstitch but I didn't test the colors ahead of time and none of the golds were dark enough to show up well. I should have just done all of that in the same dark green as the text but got frustrated and rushed the decision. It's stitched on top of full stitches (single thread, it's 18 or 22 count fabric, I forget which now), so incredibly difficult to unpick anything. Unpicking a couple different golds in the beginning was mildly traumatic.

>27 mabith: That's great news! Easy for you, and valuable to others, win win.

>28 mabith: I love book spine samplers like that, even more so because this is your own design. How did you choose the books?

>28 mabith: - Oh - I remember when you were working on this. I admired it so much that you had made up the design yourself.

>28 mabith: That is absolutely gorgeous work, Meredith. I'm so impressed you designed it yourself (I do not have that talent).

>29 lauralkeet: The choosing was a bit of a combination of books I particularly like, and other classics that had good spine designs for this purpose. I actually own that edition of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, not a book I loved personally but one my great-grandmother read it as a child, then read it to my grandmother who then read it to my mother so when I saw a lovely edition I had to buy it. I actually did a cross-stitch of that book cover as well:


>30 dudes22: Thanks!

>31 MickyFine: Thanks! It's partly I'm a miser, so designing my own stuff is a great option (plus with a fair few of my pieces it's taking common antique motifs and just pairing them amusing quotes). Though I do think I'm pretty good at taking a regular illustration or design and cross-stitchizing it.

So happy to see that you are back working on the "spine" project.

I nearly finished this other wooden frame and then ran out of floss, despite picking one that was a full skein. It's so annoying having to use three strands. It's one of the newer colors which my craft store still doesn't have in their bins, meaning I had to order it online and pay $3.50 shipping. Very frustrating.

I do like the colors a lot though. They're a bit more saturated than they show in this picture (at least on my screens).

This is the only big thing I stitched last year, and I thought I'd post it now to encourage myself.

I stitched similar pieces for my sister's two older kids (now 15 and nearly 13), and she was very impatient for this. As if I'd leave out the youngest, being a youngest child myself who did not get the same amount of handmade things as my siblings since by then the hippie craft circle in our area and our mom were too busy. However, I wasn't in a rush about it, and finishing it when he was four seemed plenty good to me (clearly I'd spoiled my sister with all the crafting for the older two).

The pattern is from Celtic Cross-Stitch by Mike Vickery. My sister literally looked through the letter patterns when she was deciding on names so she got a good letter that would look nice with the other two... I would do the date differently now, but felt it was important to use the same format as the other two pieces, especially since who knows if the kids will ever want these for their own homes.

>28 mabith: I'm loving the book spines! Your other pieces are nice too.

Made a little coaster with some of my lovely hand-dyed silk floss. I was a little obsessed with this dyer for a bit, but then I've hardly used them because you can't risk running out mid dye lot on a larger project and just general hoarding instinct.

The pattern is from Repertoire des Motifs, and of course I managed to trap a cat hair in there even after trying to be careful about it.



I don't love these coaster forms (and I don't actually use coasters much), but I have them so might as well use them. I'm working on a second one today.

>36 thornton37814: Thanks!

All of your stitching is amazing, but I just keep going back to look at that Celtic one. Gorgeous!!

Thanks, Amber! I do love that book of patterns. Though I'm a bit sad that the M isn't particularly interesting!

Another coaster, pattern doodled up by me. Might be a mistake doing these with silk before I go back to the book spines, as the fill I'll be doing is with a single strand of floss. The silk is lovely to stitch with, and knots easy to undo. Trying to undo a knot in a single strange of cotton though...

I haven't seen coasters like that in years. Were these in your stash? or did you find some recently?

Lori, I bought a few eight or nine years ago. I can't remember if I found them on eBay or Etsy or in a thrift store, but definitely not in a New Items shop. Taking a quick look at eBay, there are quite a few available there. This one is the best deal - six coasters for $16.

There are individual ones on 123stitch.com, actually, but they're $6 EACH.

>44 thornton37814: It might be a gift idea at some point.

Definitely good for that!

I've finished this frame, and I think I'll look for a photo of my previous cat to put in it.



I did a little cross-stitch ornament as well but the plastic frame doesn't click together properly and I'd already trimmed the piece way down so it's not good for anything else. Quite frustrating! I threw all of it away in a fit of pique.

I did get back to my book spines, and have been toiling away on the solid green fill. I'm about a quarter through the 2300 stitches it will need...

Now I've developed a sore right wrist for some unknown reason (it started when I hadn't done much on the book spine piece, so shouldn't be that). I don't know if I did something in my sleep or what. It's not improved at all since it started, but given my own chronic pain conditions it's not unusual for some minor issue to take far longer to go away. It's not totally preventing the stitching, but it's an annoyance.

I've been doing some designing again, and came up with some mix tape patterns. I'll reward myself with stitching one after I'm done with the current book spine.



Colors aren't really set yet, so some of these are placeholders.

>46 mabith: I'm sure it will look great with your cat's photo. I have a photo of my previous cat in my office at work. It's in a cat frame I was gifted.

>47 mabith: Those are lovely! What program do you use for designing?

>48 thornton37814: It's always nice to still see their faces around. I had a calendar of pictures printed of mine, as I had a deal for one of those online printing sites and it was the cheapest way to get a wide variety of pictures I could then cut out.

>49 MickyFine: I use a mix of things. When I'm working from an existing image I use a free photoshop-like program (gimp), so that I can let the graph paper layer be semi-transparent. That's how I used to design everything but it's not ideal for easily moving things around. Then I found an old DMC Cross Stitch Pattern Designer program, so once I have elements done in Gimp I copy them over to that where I can easily move things around, more easily add backstitching, etc... If I'm just using existing motifs I only use the DMC program. It doesn't love Windows 10 though (usable, but cranky), so I tried to switch to WinStitch which it turned out I really don't like. I also couldn't easily export anything in the manner I was accustomed to. I used to have a shop selling patterns on Etsy, so it was important to have better files for customers for the more complicated patterns.

Makes me wonder if you did one for the mix tape in the film, Guardians of the Galaxy. I forgot what Starboard named it. lol.

>50 mabith: What kind of file formats did you use for customers? I occasionally design cross-stitch patterns that I'd like to share but I also haven't found a program I really like (I ended up on Excel last time) and wasn't sure what formats I should output to.

I love the cassettes and the book spines! I'm pretty sure that's the edition of Five Little Peppers I had growing up (Still have, according to LT, although who knows where it ended up after the last shelf reorder...)

>51 al.vick: Given the popularity of the Marvel movies, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a pattern out there!

>52 melannen: I started out just using .jpgs and text files, since my patterns were pretty simple. When I needed to allow for symbols and was trying to be more professional I could use the DMC pattern design to copy an image of the pattern, put that in a text document and export the whole thing as a PDF for free with OpenOffice or LibreOffice. It's handy since you can get a really large high quality image of the pattern, make a lossless PDF, and then if the user is viewing the pattern on a screen (vs printing it out) they can zoom in up to 400% or more without any loss of image quality.

It's such a gorgeous copy of Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. I have that one myself and it's a small six inch tall hardback, probably printed in the early 1920s (it only has a copyright date inside, the original and 1909 but the paper doesn't seem right for 1909 to me and there's a gift inscription from 1925).

>52 melannen: I heard an aspiring designer asking an established designer about the software she used to create patterns and where she had the patterns printed when we were all stitching together at my LNS one day. I think PC Stitch, WinStitch, and MacStitch are the ones most used.

>47 mabith: What a fun project! Knowing myself, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from putting together the playlist for the tapes…

>55 PawsforThought: Ha, I've definitely made all these playlists at one time or another.

Well the Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm book spine is done and it really gave me trouble. We had a tornado and my power was out for a while which impacted the stitching, then I burned the pad of one of my main stitching fingers, then I ran out of thread.

Then, finally, the original light green was too dark to read well in backstitch. I tried a few things and went with using three strands of a much lighter color on the Rebecca, but I will probably redo it with two (as I used in the other text). This is a nighttime photo, and the rest of the text isn't as messy in person as it looks here (I often find this is the way with photographing blackwork and backstitch text). I'm so glad it's over. One spine left, though I will at least give myself a month before I start it. The end of this spine being frustrating is extra annoying in that it's my favorite novel in the piece, so surely it should have been nicer to me!

This has definitely become one of those pieces that I won't want to look at ever again when it's done! Just too many things I'd change on a second stitching.

Basically the second I finished Rebecca I got right to work on one of my cassette tape designs and it's going well.



It's not lost on me that these have quite a lot of single color fill as well (compared to my usual style), but it feels more manageable). My goal is to finish all the outlines and bits needing the pattern in front of me on this and a second tape in the next week.

Next Friday I'm going on a little trip with a friend, taking the train to a cute college town, largely just for the train journey. We'll be there two nights though (because Amtrak only runs three days a week in my city), so I'll have plenty of fills I can work on in the hotel (or in the train, but southern West Virginia into the Shenandoah valley is awfully scenic). My friend and I both have fatigue issues, so likely won't do a huge amount in the city we're going to, other than out for a meal or two and ice cream or some such if the weather is nice.

>58 mabith: southern West Virginia into the Shenandoah valley is awfully scenic
That should be a lovely train journey, Meredith. I live in Northern Virginia, not far from the Appalachian Trail and Harpers Ferry WV so I'm familiar with the landscape.

Laura, that's a great area! I know I'm biased, but even the interstate driving in West Virginia tends to be really lovely, weaving through the hills and largely free of any urban sprawl or awful new subdivisions etc... I am equal parts excited and nervous (since you never know what delays you might get on the train and unlike an airport there are fewer options).

Hoping for smooth travels for you!

Wishing you smooth travels and good energy levels. Have a great time!

Thanks, y'all! We're on the train and it's enjoyable.

I was going to bring my cassette tape piece but decided it would be too much of a pain to shove in a bag so I brought a ball of yarn to make a hat with.

Here's the current tape though. The brain magnetic tape part stands out more in person.

>63 mabith: It looks great!

Very cool!! I love the rainbow stripes.

I had a really lovely trip, but I'm excited to get pack to finishing the cassette project. I'm debating doing half-stitches for the black tape areas, but doing it on white 14 count is certainly a different effect than if this were 18 count fabric or a darker fabric generally. I might do a small section and see how I like it, then I can always go back over to make them full stitches.

Decided to be sensible about WIPs and finished off the hat I started knitting on my trip (I didn't do much on it then because I was nervous there would be a huge train delay and I'd need the solid knitting to calm myself down).

The colors would not capture remotely accurately, so I've edited this to be closer. The colors are all rich jewel tones in person but the green kept showing up extremely bright and much lighter in pictures. Lord knows what it's doing on other's screens.



It's just an acrylic that was on sale at some point, but I like the colors a lot. Generally I love single ply yarns but this is looser (and more slippery) than most I work with, so it was a bit of a nightmare.