Needle Crafts

My mom did crewel embroidery in the 70s and 80s, and my nana always had sizable cross-stitch pieces hanging in her house. Without realizing our familial history of needle-crafting, I picked up hand embroidery in 2019, shortly after my nana died at 92. The timing is a shame, because she would have gotten a real kick out of seeing my pieces or receiving them as gifts. But I’m grateful that I can share them with my mother, and at the same time, I can hear my nana’s voice in my head reacting with delight to each piece.

From the beginning, I’ve preferred to draft my own designs — whether by drawing and tracing a sketch, or by winging it completely. Each of the pieces below is self-drafted. I’ve only recently begun using patterns after a friend gifted me my first cross stitch kit. Though cross stitch takes much longer than hand-embroidery and involves much less variety of stitching, I instantly fell in love with the process and dove head-first into completing more patterns. Then, inevitably, I once again wound up drafting patterns of my own.