I’ve recovered two of my very first, badly made stitching projects from my childhood home. One I write about here, or hint at, rather. It’s a stitching of a pink rabbit I probably started when I was between 8 to 10 years old that I never finished, and for the fun of it thought I would not only finish now at age 30, but also turn into Lina’s birth record. I’m nearly done, but keep finding some reason not to finish it just yet. I wonder if it being 22-years old and sentimental has anything to do with it.
The second is of this little house, still in the aqua blue plastic hoop from when I dropped this project, probably around the same age. I think it must have come before the pink rabbit because my stitching is atrocious. The back-side of it is a maze of sad, confused and knotted yarn, all the strands wrapped around each other in an attempt to get somewhere else. I don’t remember who helped me with this piece. I learned from a few different people, including my Grandma Schueller, our lovely elderly neighbor Evelyn Sveum across the ridge (we lived in a valley, and our nearest neighbors were on actual hilly ridges), or my babysitter. I certainly know it wasn’t my mother because she had died when I was six. I have a framed “My Sampler of Stitches” that my mom made when she was 10 and it hangs now in my hallway here, after being stuck in a box for four years.
The needle
But whoever is responsible for teaching me let me use an extremely large needle for this small project! No wonder I had anxious decision making about where to put it and how to pull it through the fabric. Or maybe I had picked the needle myself, thinking that the bigger, sharper, and more deadly the needle, the better. Regardless, sadly, I let this one remain unfinished. Unlike the pink bunny, there is no resuscitation for this ugly little house. I’m thinking I’ll just take off the hoop, hand-clean it and iron it and then frame it. Why frame it? It’s ugly in a cute way, I guess, and I’m going through a phase where I like to frame everything. I’ve framed a lot of cross-stitching in the last year or so, like this, this, and this, and more. The problem is that our walls are concrete and it is impossible to nail and/or drill through them. So they act as props, or I rotate them. But framing a stitching somehow elevates it, kitsch-ifies it, and gives it more proper attention than stored away, don’t you think?