Cross Stitch Project Abandoned

When I was growing up, my sister and I had felt Christmas stockings that our mom had made. They were not very big and not stretchy, so there was only so much that Santa could fit in them. When I got married, and later when we had kids, I sewed stockings for my family in the same style. The Meg stocking in the photo below is the one my mom made when I was little. I made the others later.

There are so many styles of Christmas stockings. My sister had a variety for her family, as seen in the following photo.

My daughter-in-law’s family had cross stitch stockings that her grandma had made for her and her three siblings. I offered to make a stocking for our granddaughter, Blair when she was still an infant two years ago. After consulting with Kelsey and looking up options in various crafts, I ordered the following counted cross stitch kit.

The kit contained a totally blank piece of grayish white fabric canvas with little squares in the weave pattern for the stitches. All the different colors of yarn were stapled on to two strips of cardboard.

I have done many crafts in my time including cross stitch, needlepoint, embroidery, sewing, macrame, crochet, knitting, weaving, spinning, and others. I knew this project was very detailed, but I am good at that and was not worried about being able to figure it out.

There was a chart on a piece of paper with the design. Each square on the chart represented one stitch to put on the canvas. The different colors and types of stitches were represented by a different symbol. I had to figure out the design for the letters of Blair’s name using a template provided. The following photo shows only half of the entire design.

Another chart was a key to all the symbols.

The directions said to fold the canvas in half lengthwise and crosswise to find the center, then mark the spot with a bit of thread. In order to begin stitching, you start at the marked place on the canvas. I used a post-it flag to mark where I was on the pattern.

After finding the place where you want to start stitching, you look at the symbol for that stitch on the chart, and then go to the other chart to find out what color yarn to use, and what stitch. Then you get the yarn in the right color(s) from one of the cardboard strips. Then you go back to the canvas and figure out again where to put the stitches.

The vast majority of the stitches are all the same, with just a simple cross using two strands of the same color. Some stitches have two different colors of yarn. There are other stitches used for outlining, and I don’t remember what else. In the photo above the red thread is where I marked the center of the pattern. I would have started in a slightly different spot if I had realized that the stitches in the center were almost the same color as the canvas.

In order to have the minimum number of changes of yarn, you try to do all the stitches that you can reasonably get to in the color you are working with, until you run out of that piece of yarn. That means sometimes going up or down a row or skipping over some blank space. You end up with a mess on the back.

After finishing the first strand of gray yarn, the next logical group of stitches was….a different color of gray yarn.

I was working on this project almost two years ago while we were in Arizona. There was plenty of time to finish it before Blair’s first Christmas. Each session working on the cross stitch project involved laying out all the charts and supplies and getting reoriented to where I was in the design. The stitches were very, very small. My close up eyesight is not that great any more.

I usually have multiple projects going on, and I found that I was always choosing to work on one of the other projects instead of the cross stitch project. After we got back home to Minnesota that spring, the project went in a basket for a couple of months. Finally, it was a relief when I realized it was OK to not finish it. Actually, I had barely started. What you see in the photo above is as far as I got.

Kelsey was very understanding when I told her that I had bailed on the project. Before Christmas that year she bought a different stocking that was not going to be an heirloom, but fulfilled the purpose.

Now there is another granddaughter. For this year, Kelsey ordered Blair and Nora needlepoint stockings. I have done some needlepoint projects before in the distant past, and probably would have been able to do that. But maybe my eyes are not up to that either, and probably I would rather focus on my other crafts.

We’ll be spending Christmas 2025 at James and Kelsey’s house. Our daughter will be with us. Life is good, and I wish everyone a peaceful holiday season however you celebrate.