Cross stitching and life

These butterflies and the hummingbird are just a small example of the many cross stitch pictures that I have made over my life. It is something that I enjoy immensely. There is something about having a plain piece of evenweave fabric, following a pattern, and making hundreds or thousands of little crosses of many shades and hues of color that fascinates me. I sometimes get caught up in it and want to finish with a color or section of the picture, including the outlining, that just makes the images pop! It sometimes takes many weeks, months, or even years to finish a large project. I have one hanging in my home that took about 10 years from beginning to end. I planned to take a picture of it and put it on my blog, but it is framed with glass that reflects the light and the picture just didn't work out. It is a picture of an oak tree signifying my family tree. It has our family, my husband and I and our children and the four generations on each side - one for the Asay family and one for the Thompson family. I hope that it will be saved by my family for future generations.

When I named this blog lindasxstitches, it was because of my love for cross stitching, but since choosing that name, I have thought about it and feel that it has a relationship to my life. I have never been very adept at keeping a day-to-day journal. I have written down what I felt were important things from time to time, but never have kept a daily record. I now want to piece together some things that I have experienced and learned throughout my life, thus the correlation to cross stitching. As my pictures start on an empty fabric, so did my life and it has been made up of many stitches of all different shades and hues. I intend to put together a picture of my life by remembering and putting together some of the significant and probably insignificant experiences that make me who I am. One thing I am blessed with is a pretty good memory and a knack for detail. This will in no way be cronological, but will be swatches of my life that hopefully, when put together, will add up to who I am. I am truly an unfinished picture and will be until the very end. Maybe some of my grandchildren or great grandchildren will want to read it to find out about their "granny" and other ancestors.